Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing [2 ed.] 1501383949, 9781501383946

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Praise for the Second Edition “I know of nothing else like it. There is no better single-volume textbook for introducing, explaining, and engaging thoughtfully (and literarily) with conceptual ideas and the power of language to change the world. Period.” Kristen L. Over, Associate Professor of English and Coordinator for Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Northeastern Illinois University, USA, and author of Kingship, Conquest, and Patria (2005). “Calvin Thomas pulls no punches in this round two of Ten Lessons in Theory. Looking for ‘good trouble,’ Thomas goes to the mat for critical theory against its antagonists and the fearmongering, book banning, race-baiting, homophobic, anti-woman, trans-hating demagogues who will hate this book. Is literary theory political? You bet it is. But from Thomas’s deft pen, theory soars invitingly. Students looking for a guide to the most exciting and challenging intellectual journey are sure to love this book.” Michael Drexler, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA, and author of The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmic Aaron Burr (with Ed White, 2014) “One of the key premises in this expanded edition of Ten Lessons in Theory is that theory is fundamentally literature; it is a genre of creative writing. To that end, Thomas’s book is truly sui generis as an introduction to critical theory that performs the intellectual miracle of being both erudite and entertaining. Ten Lessons is virtuosic in its scope and reach as it tracks early theoretical developments in continental philosophy to present day critical theories of race, gender, and identity while somehow, against all odds, never feeling overwhelming or pedantic. Ten Lessons reaffirms and revitalizes the importance of critical theory as a necessary toolkit to help make meaning of our often disorienting social and political present.” Kevin Wynter, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, Pomona College, USA, and author of Critical Race Theory and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (Bloomsbury, 2022)

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Praise for the First Edition “Gorgeously written and compellingly argued, Calvin Thomas’s Ten Lessons in Theory provides students of all levels with a sparklingly insightful initiation into the full intellectual sweep of what is known as ‘theory’ in today’s humanities. But, in addition to this, Thomas offers even the most seasoned scholars a plethora of creative new perspectives on the past two centuries running from post-Kantian German idealism to the aftermath of ‘postmodernism.’ Ten Lessons in Theory accomplishes nothing less than a radical reconfiguration of our contemporary theoretical conjuncture through its Lacan-inspired reactivation of the more-relevant-than-ever legacies of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Everyone from undergraduates to full professors to curious lay readers has a great deal to learn from Thomas. One cannot find a surer, clearer, and more enlightening guide to this tricky intellectual terrain anywhere.” Adrian Johnston, Professor of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, USA, and author of Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008) “Ten Lessons in Theory will make you fall in love with theory. And if you already are, it will make you congratulate yourself for having such a splendid beloved. No ordinary introduction to theory, Calvin Thomas’s treatise is a dazzling, articulate, impassioned, and wholly convincing argument for why theory matters and should continue to matter. Through a close explication of some of theory’s most famous statements, Thomas brings theoretical reasoning to life in ways that keep the reader—even the expert reader— riveted. Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud get the special attention they deserve, and Lacan animates the text the way only Lacan—when well explained—can. The next time a student complains about the ‘uselessness’ or ‘difficulty’ of theory, I’ll hand them Ten Lessons in Theory.” Mari Ruti, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Toronto, Canada, and author of The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within (2012) “This beautifully written and imaginatively conceived introduction to critical theory is effectively structured around the ‘ten lessons’ of the title. It offers something genuinely new by focussing in detail on the legacies of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, whose insights, while foundational to much critical theory, are all too often passed over in cursory fashion in other guides.” Lisa Downing, Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality, University of Birmingham, UK, and author of The Cambridge Introduction to Foucault (2008) ii

Praise for the First Edition

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“[A] wide-ranging, incisive and sometimes polemical tour through contemporary literary theory . . . Any student or teacher of theory who has trouble giving a sympathetic audience to psychoanalytic concepts and approaches would benefit from the first half of Thomas’s book. Thomas has a gift for not only making Lacanian psychoanalysis clear, but also for making these concepts seem virtually self-evident. . . . Ten Lessons in Theory should be read widely. Thomas makes a passionate, compelling case for the work of theory, for the political purchase of a certain way of thinking and writing theoretically. He also does an exceptional job of making surprising connections across theoretical approaches and ideas. For the student who does not understand why virtually impenetrable texts are being assigned with such frequency, or why they are considered a necessary part of one’s education, Thomas’s book will not only help clear the conceptual ground, but will also give the student some sense of why grappling with complexity and density is worthwhile in the first place.” Chiasma: A Site For Thought “Thomas’s advocacy is a spirited rhetorical performance, made more valiant when considered in the context of our distinctly post-theory climate. . . . In lesser hands, this ambitious exercise might have easily ended up in a dizzying theoretical tour, rushed and routine, but Thomas develops an admirably tight narrative, marshaling vast multiplicities of often competing theories into an elegant labyrinthine argument, all the while offering sharp and fresh accounts of the different positions in question. The book would make for a perfect introduction to readers new to Theory.” Recherche littéraire/Literary Research “Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing is an excellent, thoughtful, and sophisticated introduction to the use of theory in critical work. Calvin Thomas encourages readers to have a better understanding of foundational theoretical texts on a fundamental level . . . This introduction is nuanced and holds something for everyone.” Literary Research and British Postmodernism

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Ten Lessons in Theory

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Ten Lessons in Theory A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing SECOND EDITION

Calvin Thomas

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2013 This edition published 2023 Copyright © Calvin Thomas, 2023 Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover images © Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thomas, Calvin, 1956- author. Title: Ten lessons in theory : a new introduction to theoretical writing / Calvin Thomas. Other titles: 10 lessons in theory Description: Second edition. | New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | First published in the United States of America 2013. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A thoroughly updated edition of the witty and engaging exploration of the history, application, and tenets of literary theory in ten lessons”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022058971 (print) | LCCN 2022058972 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501383953 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501383946 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501383977 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501383960 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501383984 (ebook other) Subjects: LCSH: English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Criticism—History. | Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. Classification: LCC PE1403 .T46 2023 (print) | LCC PE1403 (ebook) | DDC 808/.042—dc23/eng/20221220 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058971 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058972 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-5013-8395-3 978-1-5013-8394-6 978-1-5013-8397-7 978-1-5013-8396-0

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For all of us animals at the mercy of language.

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Contents Prologue to the Second Edition: Bad timing, Good Trouble Preface to the Second Edition: “Something (still) worth reading”: Theory and/as the Art of the Sentence I: Towards a more better failed introduction II: Unpacking “antiphysis” and “extimacy” III: It don’t mean a thing if it’s not not a thing IV: “It ain’t necessarily so” V: “You can’t handle the truth!”

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Introductory Matters: What Theory Does, Why Theory Lives I: Theory is [still undead] everywhere II: The problem with givens III: Just being difficult/being difficultly just

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Part 1 Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis

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Lesson One: “The world must be made to mean” —or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality

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I: Work with words II: Post-oceanic feelings Lesson Two: “Meaning is the polite word for pleasure” —or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read I: Bungle in the jungle II: l’être pour la lettre III: Happier endings Lesson Three: “Language is by nature fictional” —or, why the word for moonlight can’t be moonlight I: Down to earth II: Giving (up) the finger III: Thanks for nothing

1 1 7

29 33

39 39 47 50

54 54 57 59

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Contents

Lesson Four: “Desire must be taken literally” —a few words on death, sex, and interpretation I: II: III: IV:

“a few words” “on death” “sex” “and interpretation”

Lesson Five: “You are not yourself ” —or, I (think, therefore I) is an other I: Missing persons, bodies in pieces II: Ideology is eternal III: Aesthetics of resistance?

66 66 74 81 89

97 97 111 125

Part 2 Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity

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Lesson Six: “This restlessness is us” —or, the least that can be said about Hegel

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I: II: III: IV:

Thesis Antithesis Ecce Homo “He positively danced”

Lesson Seven: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” —or, the fates of literary formalism I: “not a pretty thing” II: What’s the matter with formalism? III: Strategies of estrangement Lesson Eight: “The unconscious is structured like a language” —or, invasions of the signifier I: Without positive terms II: Adventures in metaphor and metonymy III: “the phallus”—for lack of a worser word

135 143 150 157

160 160 165 173

180 180 188 198

Contents Lesson Nine: “There is nothing outside the text” —or, fear of the proliferation of meaning I: Given to excess II: “What are we calling postmodernity?” III: “something strange to me, although it is at the very heart of me” IV: We must all fail better Lesson Ten: “One is not born a woman” —on making the world queerer than ever I: II: III: IV:

My (still male feminist) credo “The future is kid’s stuff ” In the end: theory is (not—) forever The ending isn’t over: or, that’s/we’re “the not-all,” folks

Reference Matters Index

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213 213 234 253 260

265 265 286 292 296 298 319

Prologue to the Second Edition: Bad Timing, Good Trouble It was late May of 2020 when my editors at Bloomsbury invited me to start “thinking big” about a second edition—revised, updated, and expanded—of Ten Lessons in Theory: An Introduction to Theoretical Writing, first published in 2013. I was a bit surprised but of course extremely pleased to receive their invitation. At that time, however, we were only a few months into the COVID lockdown. I was fairly anxiously caught up in training to “Master On-line Teaching” and preparing, out of necessity, to completely rethink all my longcherished pedagogical practices. At the same time, we were more than a few months away from some pretty important elections in November, and, as I confessed to my sympathetic editors, I thought I might very well have to wait for the outcome of those contests, and to know whether or not our democracy itself was going to survive, to be able to think “bigly,” or even coherently at all, about the project of recomposing this book. Nonetheless, by the end of October, I had submitted a sufficiently cogent proposal, which went through a fairly lengthy but ultimately successful review process (and I’ll here give heartfelt thanks to the four outside evaluators). By late May of 2021, the second edition of Ten Lessons in Theory was under contract, and the rebooting of this New Introduction to Theoretical Writing was well underway. It is now late May of 2022. I’ve pretty much “mastered” (and, to my surprise and dismay, in some ways even come to prefer) on-line instruction. However, for reasons to be spelled out in greater detail in the Preface—but primarily concerning what George Yancy, in his endorsement of Sheldon George and Derek Hook’s 2022 collection on Lacan and Race, has called “the unabashed reemergence of white racism within the context of a greater neo-fascist threat”—I am more anxious than ever about the fate of democracy in America and elsewhere around the world. And yet despite that anxiety I have somehow managed to revise, update, and expand Ten Lessons, and I hope that you’ll find the results of my labor not only “something worth reading” (as per Samuel Beckett’s minimalist definition of “literature,” which you’re just about to see) but something worth using in the struggle against the recrudescent racism and festering neo-fascism that Professor Yancy so bracingly describes. I hope that the new Ten Lessons will help make what civil rights hero Congressman John Lewis, who died in July of 2020 (and whose muraled image I used to see regularly when I still drove down Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue xiv

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to get to my “in-person” teaching gig at Georgia State), loved to call “good trouble.” I hope, in other words, that I’ve actually accomplished what I two years ago explicitly proposed to my editors, which was to develop the second edition of Ten Lessons as an anti-racist overhaul of the first. Or, alluding to another line from Beckett that you’re also soon to see, I hope that I will have at least failed better with this effort than I managed to fail with the last. I’ll describe at some length the substantive changes I’ve made in these lessons, and what motivated me to make them, in the greatly expanded Preface. Here I’ll simply alert you to a few bibliographical updates and provide some guidance in how best to approach this writing. Bibliographically speaking, I’ll tell you that I’ve coordinated or “synched” the second edition of Ten Lessons with two other recent Bloomsbury publications: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (2019), edited by Jeffrey R. di Leo, and Adventures in Theory: A Compact Anthology (2019), edited by yours truly. I’ll tell you that I developed Adventures—which gathers primary writings from Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and fourteen others—quite specifically to serve as a companion text for Ten Lessons, and so rebooting the second edition involved my recasting all relevant quotations and citations so that everything would, as it were, “match up.” So, for example, the lines from the Foucault selection, called “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” quoted in Lesson Four, are now followed by a parenthetical reference not only to the original source but also to the appropriate page-number in Adventures. And it goes like this: “everything is already interpretation” (Foucault 1967/1998: 275; Adventures: 95). As for the frequently referenced Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, that long title will generally be abbreviated to BHLCT to save space and help keep me from exceeding the word-count I’ve been allotted. On the other hand, I’ve opted not to abbreviate Adventures in Theory to the curt AT— quite simply because I like the way the word Adventures appears on the page. Also under the rubric of bibliographical updates I’ll mention two other recent publications that became very important to me in rewriting Ten Lessons. They are This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2020), composed by Martin Hägglund, and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (2021), created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, et al. I’ve of course cited quite a few post-2013 publications by quite a number of theoretical writers in the second edition, but these two defenses of the possibility of radical democracy are to my current sensibilities the most crucial, and I quote them both extensively throughout. As for the aforementioned guidance, it first of all involves the extensive footnotes that pervaded the first edition of this text and that may at times seem to overwhelm the second. I’ve in fact greatly expanded many of these

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“excurses,” sometimes even giving them boldfaced titles—like “Excursus on the word ‘antiphysis’ ” and “An excursus on Afropessimism” and, one of my favorites, “Take this synthesis and shove it!”. Moreover, I’ve insisted on retaining these footnotes as footnotes, on the same page as what I’ll call the main narrative, rather than situating them as endnotes at the back of the book, where (let’s get real) few of you will ever read them, and I’ve insisted on this placement because the discourse appearing in these unwieldy excurses is, to put this delicately, really fucking important. As in the first edition, here the footnotes often serve to “unpack” boldfaced critical keywords (like antiphysis and Afropessimism and dialectic). But quite a few of my efforts to rewrite these lessons to make them more compellingly anti-racist also appear in the longer footnotes, and even though these items do appear towards the “bottom” of the page, that does not mean that I’m “relegating” those efforts to some lowly subordinate status. The footnotes are crucial, not marginal, as significant or sometimes even more so than what’s transpiring in the main narrative (even if the font-size is slightly smaller). So, whatever else you do when studying this story, please don’t curse the excurses. And, speaking of studying stories, here’s some more instructional guidance: given that one of the major premises of this “introduction” is that “theoretical writing” is “something worth reading” and so, as per that upcoming line from Beckett, may be taken as a strong dose of “literature,” a particular (and politically progressive) genre of “creative writing,” I would ask you to consider reading this writing not merely for the sake of “meaning,” “comprehension,” or “knowledge” but with some close attention to its poetics, what I like to call its “will to style,” those moments where music is as important as “meaning,” sound as significant as sense. As you’ve perhaps just noticed, I’m all-in with alliteration, but I’m also all about the rhythm. For example, often when I get emphatic with a certain word by putting it in italics, it isn’t so much to stress the word’s “meaning” but rather for the sheer sake of cadence, to show you where I’d want the beats to fall were I performing or reading this stuff out loud (and if you happened to note what I just attempted with the phrase “sake of cadence,” for example, then you’re already reading these pedagogical prose poems in a way that, well, gives me pleasure). Now, it isn’t that I don’t want you to “get the meaning” of this writing— though, as we’ll be learning later on, some of the most notoriously gnarly theoretical writing does indeed like to play hard to get. I do very much want you to “get the drift” of these lessons, but I also desire that you take some pleasure from this text, if only the pleasure (or perhaps the pain) of learning, as you will in Lesson Two, that “meaning” is only “the polite word for pleasure” in the first place.

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To find out what that assertion means, to find out why “the world must be made to mean” (Lesson One), why “language is by nature fictional” (Lesson Three), why “desire must be taken literally” (Lesson Four) and so on, please please me by reading on. But to discover why I just called theoretical writing a “politically progressive” genre of creative writing, consider that I’m taking the word “progressive” from Mari Ruti’s phrase “progressive critical theory,” the field she “loosely” defines “as a combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, poststructuralism, Marxism, cultural studies, and deconstructive feminist and queer theory” (2018b: 51). Now, as in the first edition of Ten Lessons, here in the second you’ll be learning a lot about this loosely defined combination (and in particular the very large part played in it by Jacques Lacan). But, also as in the first edition, here in the second you won’t be learning squat about more than a few other critical fields and theoretical figures. If you’re curious about “post-critique,” “affect theory,” “ecocriticism,” or “digital humanities,” for examples, or if you’re invested in delving into Deleuze, you’ll just have to let me refer you to the BHLCT , because CT (yours truly) still has nothing productive or progressive to write in regard to these matters. I hope, however, that despite those gaps in my so-called expertise you’ll still find the writing in the second edition of this text both productive and progressive—provided you still believe in the possibility of progress, provided that you might come to believe in “theory” as a “liberatory practice,” as the Black feminist bell hooks tags it in her book called Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994: 59), provided that you might muster the “secular faith” to believe in writing itself as an avenue of “spiritual freedom,” in writing itself as what you’re just about to read the French feminist Hélène Cixous posit as “the very possibility of change” (1975/2007: 1646). At the very least, I hope, again, that you’ll find the new edition of Ten Lessons “something worth reading,” something that gives you pleasure (or at least not too much pain), maybe even something you can use in your own writing, in the cause of whatever changes in the world or yourself that you’d like to see happen, in the service of whatever “good trouble” you can take the trouble (to trouble yourself) to make.

Preface to the Second Edition “Something (still) worth reading”: Theory and/as the Art of the Sentence

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words. Ursula K. Le Guin (2014) Writing [is] the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. Hélène Cixous (1975/2007: 1626) Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett (1980: 89)

I: Towards a more better failed introduction I began the preface to the first edition of Ten Lessons in Theory by trotting out some “literature,” a little bit of “creative writing.” I began, that is, by writing that near the end of Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, the narrator, who calls himself Moran, encounters a strange man on a lonely road. Words, as I wrote, are somewhat nonsensically exchanged, and violence of some sort apparently ensues. For as Moran rather vaguely reports: I do not know what happened then. But a little later, perhaps a long time later, I found him stretched on the ground, his head in a pulp. I am sorry I cannot indicate more clearly how this result was obtained, it would have been something worth reading. But it is not at this late stage of my relation that I intend to give way to literature. (1955: 151)

At this early stage of my relation, I can less vaguely report that I first marshaled this little morsel of pulp fiction mainly to note the neat definition of xviii

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“literature” that Beckett’s narrator provides: “literature,” we read, is, simply, “something worth reading.” Next I wrote that toward the beginning of his landmark Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton offers a similarly simple definition, a “purely formal, empty sort of definition,” of “literature”: “Perhaps,” Eagleton opines, “ ‘literature’ means . . . any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly” (1983/1996: 8). I then employed Eagleton’s authority to announce my own desire to disturb the definitional distinction between “literature” and “theory,” to begin introducing “literary theory” as a particular practice of writing that “for some reason or another” more than a few somebodies have managed to value highly (even if others, inside and outside the humanities, continue to revile and attack it).1 Taken together, I wrote, 1

Excursus on the attacks on theory (and theorists): I will briefly address the old academic conservative “resistance to theory” in the Introduction. Here, however, I’ll note that contemporary attacks on “theory”—specifically, on gender/sexuality studies and critical race theory (the term will be glossed below)—hail from well outside the halls of higher education, from a well-funded global evangelical white-nationalist book-banning/witchburning far-right that has never not been energized by race-hatred, homophobia, and misogyny. See Goldberg (2021), Blow (2021), Bouie (2022), and Wynter (2022) for contextual analyses. See also Fausto-Sterling (2018) for the report that in October of that year “Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary banned university-level gender studies programs, declaring that ‘people are born either male or female’ and that it is unacceptable ‘to talk about socially constructed genders rather than biological sexes.’ ” And don’t miss Scott Jaschik’s “Judith Butler on Being Attacked in Brazil” (2017), which describes how “the noted philosopher and gender theorist was burned (as a witch) in effigy” at an academic conference on “the ends of democracy” in São Paolo. As Butler interprets the episode: “My sense is that the group who engaged this frenzy of effigy burning, stalking and harassment want to defend ‘Brazil’ as a place where LGBTQ people are not welcome, where the family remains heterosexual (so no gay marriage), where abortion is illegal and reproductive freedom does not exist. They want boys to be boys, and girls to be girls, and for there to be no complexity in questions such as these. The effort is antifeminist, antitrans, homophobic and nationalist, using social media to stage and disseminate their events. In this way, they resemble the forms of neo-fascism that we see emerging in different parts of the world. Indeed, they reminded us at the conference why we were right to worry about the state of democracy.” And to bring this worry about the state of democracy world-wide back to the homeland, I’ll note that when Butler was leaving São Paolo one of her Brazilian harassers yelled out the promise that “Trump” was going to “take care” of them. And, given my desire to dissolve the binary between “theory” and “literature,” I’ll note that rampant Trumpanistas in this country, calling themselves “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Against Critical Theory,” etc., are currently using “critical race theory” as a blanket term to attack literary works as well, particularly if authored by Black women. See Lerer and Epstein (2021). At the time of this writing, legislation being introduced by Republicans in numerous states (37 by Education Week’s count, according to Bouie) would ban the mention of any LGBTQ matters as well as the teaching of any writing—literary, theoretical, or historical—on the subjects of race and racism, any writing that might cause “discomfort” to white parents and their snowflakey spawn. These bans would cover works like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project (a history project that includes a lot of Black-authored fiction and poetry), and many others. As for the promised gloss on critical race theory, I’ll let Kevin Wynter tell you that at its

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Eagleton’s and Beckett’s definitions of “literature” allow this writer to suggest that “theory,” like “literature,” is nothing other than “something worth reading,” that “giving way to literature” and “falling into theory” (Richter 1999) can be intimately related responses to remarkably similar temptations. I then went on to write that Ten Lessons was written as a sort of “literary” introduction to “the activities that have come to answer to the nickname theory” (Culler 2007: 1) and to lay out the three major premises upon which this book is (still) staked. The first premise involves the importance, for any student of theory, of a more sustained encounter with the ground-breaking writings of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud than anyone is likely to get from any other introduction to theory, while the second involves what the Marxist theoretical writer Fredric Jameson describes as “the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan’s is the richest” (2006: 365–6). In keeping with these two premises, discourse concerning the quartet named above (still) pervades Ten Lessons, and the book (still) pays steadier attention to the richness of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings than any other theoretical introduction (that isn’t specifically introducing Lacan). Meanwhile, the book’s third premise continues to be that “literary theory” isn’t simply gnarly speculation “about” literature, but that theory fundamentally is literature, after all: something well worth reading, a genre of writing that quite a few readers have for some time now valued highly, even enjoyed immensely—though perhaps not altogether painlessly.2 The

2

core is the claim that “racial prejudice is not the result of isolated acts of bigotry, but the result of systemic anti-Black oppression rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. The idea is that although slavery was constitutionally abolished in the Thirteenth Amendment its fundamentally racist principles were not eradicated. Instead, they were modified and reintroduced through legal instruments such as Jim Crow and other segregationist laws whose purpose was to prop up white supremacy and maintain an inequitable playing field between races. Thus, racism is understood to be a pervasive phenomenon embedded in the legal and institutional structures of America that, despite the abolition of explicitly anti-Black laws, continues to ripple diffusely across all areas of social, political, and economic Black life. In sum, the work of critical race theorists seeks to identify and reveal how present-day institutional arrangements are generally designed to perpetuate antiBlack racism and codify its operations so that they appear ordinary rather than aberrant” (2022: 13). Wynter adds that “to understand how critical race theory offers a kit of intellectual tools for analyzing the difficult subject of race it is essential to recognize that the humanist fields of legal theory, critical theory, philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, as well as the aesthetic (experiential) practices of poetry, storytelling, and memoir writing, to name a few, are all facets of critical race theory” (2022: 14, emphasis added to underscore the point that my own interdisciplinary desire to dissolve the boundary between “theory” and “literature” has always already been enacted in critical race theory and, more generally, the field of radical Black cultural production itself). “Where does it hurt?”: The question of whether “theory” will be a pain-causer or a painkiller for you will likely depend upon your current level of comfort. I start my intro to Adventures in Theory with the artist Banksy’s assertion that the purpose of art is to

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book (still) argues and attempts to demonstrate that what Jameson calls “the writing called theoretical” is nothing if not a specific genre of “creative writing,” a particular way of engaging with what Le Guin calls “the art of words,” what I like calling the art of the sentence, the art of making sentences that make trouble, maybe even John Lewis’s “good trouble”— sentences that articulate the desire to make radical changes in the very fabric, the very fabrication, of human reality. Mixing a bell hooks title with a phrase from Michel Foucault, I will here hazard to describe “theoretical writing” as a liberatory practice of creativity.3 And while I won’t say that all writing should be considered “theoretical,” I will insist that all theory is always in writing, is always committed to writing, and that all theoretical writing that merits that nickname involves writing about “writing as the very possibility of change,” what Hélène Cixous calls the “springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (1975/2007: 1646). Now, both the presentation and the performance of Ten Lessons remain consistent with this emphasis on sentence-making as trouble-making transformation. The book still proceeds in the form of ten “lessons,” each lesson based on an axiomatic sentence or “truth-claim” selected from the canons of critical theory. Each lesson works by extensively “unpacking” its

3

“comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable” and then assert that the purpose of theory is “to disturb everybody—to abrade all our staid assumptions, disrupt all our fixed understandings, undermine all our normalized meanings, and alienate us from all our familiarized identities” (1). Or, to borrow Rina Arya’s wording, the purpose of the art of theory is to “perforate the boundaries of comfortable understanding” (2014: 26). But do “all of us” actually deserve to have our assumptions abraded, understandings disrupted, meanings undermined, identities unsettled, boundaries perforated, and so forth? Do the disturbed—or, more to the point, the sexually and racially and economically oppressed, those suffering human beings Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” really need any further disturbance? Can “theory” not offer that politically abjected portion of “all of us” any prospect of consolation? I’ll partially answer that question by letting one of the historically immiserated speak for herself. In the chapter of Teaching to Transgress called “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” bell hooks writes: “I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted the hurt to go away. I saw in theory . . . a location of healing” (1994: 59). So, again, the question of whether “theory” will be a site of hurting or healing (or both) for you will depend on where you’re coming (to theory) from. More on these matters anon, but here I’ll just toss out a couple of well-known analgesic maxims: the one from the gym (no pain, no gain), the other from Nietzsche: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. As you can read in the footnote above, the bell hooks title is “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” And as you’ll see in Lesson Five, Foucault, in an interview called “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” deploys the “aesthetic” phrase “practice of creativity” in an attempt to throw off the burdens of identitarian “authenticity.”

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featured sentence, exploring the sentence’s conditions of possibility and potentially subversive implications, asking what it means to say that “the world must be made to mean” (Stuart Hall), that “meaning is the polite word for pleasure” (Adam Philips), that “one is not born a woman” (Simone de Beauvoir), and so on. In the course of exploring the conditions and consequences of these sentences, the lessons (still) work and play together to articulate some of the most basic assumptions and motivations supporting theoretical writing, from its earliest stirrings to its most current turbulences. Still provided in each lesson or chapter is a working glossary: specific critical keywords are boldfaced on their first appearance and defined either in the text or in a long footnote (and please go back to the Prologue to see what I said about the importance of the footnotes). But while each lesson involves an explication of the working terms and core tenets of theoretical writing as such, each also attempts to exemplify or perform theoretical writing as a liberatory practice of creativity in and of itself. And if all that sounds pretentious, or overly ambitious, I’ll tell you that each lesson in its own special way fails at the attempt, which is why I’ve begun the preface to the second edition of Ten Lessons with an epigraphic nod to, again, Samuel Beckett, why I’m humbly grateful to have been given the opportunity to try teaching you these lessons and to try introducing you to theoretical writing once again—to “try again,” no doubt to “fail again,” but, maybe, this time around, to fail even better.

II: Unpacking “antiphysis” and “extimacy” The ten lessons in Ten Lessons are (still) divided into two parts, and Part One is still called “Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis.” The word antiphysis actually appears but rarely in the canons of theoretical writing; the word isn’t glossed in any of the critical dictionaries I’ve employed here to explicate key theoretical terms (not even the BHLCT ). And yet the word “antiphysis” does quite nicely convey the core tenet of what’s called historical materialism—Karl Marx’s (to my mind permanently revolutionary) argument that human animals distinguish themselves from non-human animals, and that human history as the history of a humanity “constantly in the making” (Beauvoir 1949/2011: 44) begins, back when our proto-human ancestors for whatever reason first stopped “passively submit[ting] to the presence of nature” (62), first started working to produce, make, or fabricate the very conditions of their specifically human (which is to say, not exactly “natural,” not “completely” animal, but rather “sociogenic” and/or

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“biocultural”) existence.4 The word “antiphysis” thus concerns the rudimentary but transformative labor—the actual practical work on or against physical nature—that must be performed for any “human reality” whatsoever ever to form itself, ever to bring itself into being, to create itself “via an ongoing process of wresting form from matter” (Jackson 2020: 35). And from the historical materialist point of view all human realities do, in fact, actively or practically but in any case transformatively bring themselves into being. All human realities are ongoing exercises in anthropogenesis, a word that concerns the human genesis, the human origin, the human production, of the human qua human.5

4

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I borrow the words “sociogenic” and “biocultural” from Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s 2020 study Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. Jackson writes that “the questions pursued in Becoming Human are biocultural, or more precisely sociogenic: they concern the ways that we are Homo Narrans, both bios and mythos” (34). The questions pursued in Ten Lessons are also biocultural, sociogenic, anthropogenetic, narrational, etc.—questions, in other words, about the story of what it means to be human, to be or become human, a humanized form of life, in a world, antiblack or maybe someday otherwise, that must be made to mean. Excursus on the word “antiphysis”: At the beginning of the chapter called “The Point of View of Historical Materialism” in her feminist landmark The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes that “The theory of historical materialism has brought to light some very important truths. Humanity is not an animal species: it is a historical reality. Human society is an anti-physis: it does not passively submit to the presence of nature, but rather appropriates it. This appropriation is not an interior, subjective operation [i.e., not merely an exercise in thought]: it is carried out objectively in praxis [i.e., through actual damn work]” (1949/2011: 62). Elsewhere, Beauvoir’s buddy Jean-Paul Sartre labors to inform us that “work is by itself anti-physis; its definition is to be anti-nature nature, which is precisely the essence of every cultural phenomenon” (1981: 36). The work of understanding “antiphysis,” then, will entail our coming to terms with the argument that any and every human reality is an historical reality and thus essentially always a “cultural phenomenon,” which is to say an inescapably linguistic phenomenon, never simply “natural” or completely “animal” but always caught up in a humanly produced system of sociogenic significations, what Lacan, as we’ll see, calls “the symbolic order.” Now, Lacan himself lets the word “antiphysis” drop only a couple of times in his Écrits, and then only in passing, without elaboration, as when, in “Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power,” he refers to antiphysis as “our particular subject matter” (1966f/2006: 514). But probably the most pertinent treatment of the word “antiphysis” for our purposes occurs in Roland Barthes’ “Myth Today,” where Barthes writes that the ideological “principle” of what he calls “myth” is to “transform history into nature” (1957/1985: 129; Adventures 86), to “naturalize” or try to “eternalize” socially produced significations, what Sylvia Wynter calls “behavior-regulatory inferential system[s] of meaning” (1990: 358), and to perform this “naturalizing” trick by operating “the inversion of anti-physis into pseudo-physis” (1957/1985: 142; Adventures 87). We’ll be returning to Lacan’s “symbolic order” and to the “particular subject matter” of Barthes’ analysis of “myth” quite a few times in Ten Lessons. Here suffice it to say that, from the historical materialist point of view, what gets called “nature” works more often than not as the ally of ideology, the alibi of domination, the “eternal” justification of sexually and racially and economically oppressive systems of meaning.

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The phrase “textual anthropogenesis,” then, involves what’s called linguistic determinism, or what I’ll call semiotic materialism, the argument, also to my mind permanently revolutionary, that any human reality, and any individual or collective “subject” thereof, any and all persons, must be made out of language as a specifically “anti-natural”—unreal or “anti-real”—form of productive labor.6 Thus the book’s first five lessons all in various ways concern work with words, what the Lacanian Marxist Slavoj Žižek calls “the virtual character of the symbolic order” of language as “the very condition of human historicity” (1999/2002: 241); they all concern the (quite complicated but, let’s face it, undeniable) differences between human animals and non-human animals, between “human reality” and “the real,” as well as the constitutive interrelations between semiotic and historical materialisms; they all address the linguistic formations and transformations, the political inscriptions and ideological interpellations, of “our particular subject matter,” the specifically human subject, the “animal at the mercy of language” (Lacan 1966f/2006: 514, 525), the animal sentenced to keep making sentences in the utterly anthropogenetic, socio-symbolic, textual, virtual, unnatural, or otherwise unreal reality that is, so to speak, ours.7 6

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On the subject of the “the subject”: Theoretical writers use the term subject to designate the human individual as constituted by linguistic, discursive, and socio-cultural practices (which is to say, the human individual as such); in theory, human “subjects” exist as human subjects only by virtue of being “subjected” to these practices—hence, as Louis Althusser puts it, “the ambiguity of the term subject” (1971/2001: 123). The term “subject” sometimes refers to “the rational, active mind of the human individual” and is “defined in opposition to the object—that which is other than consciousness” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 256). But what concerns most theoretical writers is the permeability of the boundary between conscious and unconscious, subject and object, self and other, particularly, as we’ll be seeing, in ambiguous moments of “writing or self-representation” when “the I is the selfpresent subject of the sentence as well as the subject ‘subjected’ to the symbolic order of the language in which [it] is writing” (Gagnier 1991: 9). For more on this subject, see the entries on self, subject, and subjectivity in the BHLCT and Susan Hekman’s chapter called “Subject” in the Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory. “There is no natural way for us to be”: Some “nature-loving” readers may already be uncomfortable with this emphasis on antiphysis and the historical materialist insistence upon a constitutive distinction between the human on the one hand and the natural/ animal on (or as) “the other.” Some “posthumanist” and/or “new materialist” thinkers would deride that distinction as emerging from an unwarranted (and ultimately environmentally devastating) anthropocentric “exceptionalism” or arrogant “speciesism.” We’ll be considering posthumanism just a little bit a little later on. Here, however, I’m going to let Martin Hägglund respond to the posthumanist complaint against historical materialism. In the chapter of This Life called “Natural and Spiritual Freedom,” Hägglund writes that “Many contemporary thinkers are critical of any distinction between humans and other animals, since they fear that the distinction will serve to justify sexism or racism, as well as buttress the mistreatment of other species and the willful extraction of natural resources. Yet such ‘posthumanism’ rests on a conflation of historical facts and philosophical arguments. As a matter of historical fact, it is true that a human/animal distinction often has been employed to classify certain genders and races as ‘subhuman’

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Part Two of Ten Lessons is still called “Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity.” A key Lacanian neologism, the word extimacy mixes “exteriority” with “intimacy” and thereby “neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between the inside and the outside, between container and contained” (Evans 1996: 58). The word “extimacy” signifies the unsettling idea that “the innermost, intimate core of a person’s psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign ‘thing’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86). “Extimacy” implicates us in that disturbing “coincidence of utter alterity with absolute proximity” which “brings us close to what, in ourselves, must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe” (Žižek 1999/2008: 368). And so here the word “extimacy” marks the various ways theoretical writing tends, like the Möbius strip so beloved by Lacan, to turn itself and its readers inside out and outside in, to “perforate the boundaries of comfortable understanding” (Arya 2014: 26), to disturb, rather than to sustain, the consistency of our symbolic universes—to rock, so to speak, our little worlds. As we’ll be seeing, “extimacy” can also serve to condense the various concerns with alienation, alterity, foreignness, constitutive otherness, difference, queerness, blackness, and so forth that continue to pervade and motivate theoretical writing as a world-disturbing if not earth-shattering practice of creativity.8

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and to legitimize ruthless exploitation of the nonhuman world. The critique of such politics is well taken, as is the reminder that we too are animals and dependent on the fate of our environment. However, it does not follow from these facts than any distinction between humans and other animals is illegitimate or politically pernicious” (2020: 178). I would go further and say that the attempted erasure of any distinction between human animals and non-human animals could have some pretty pernicious political consequences as well: my conclusion that there’s no difference between human and animal flesh, for example, could allow me to become not a humane vegan but a Hannibal Lecter. Erasing the human/animal distinction doesn’t necessarily lead to treating “all of us” critters humanely. Nor does ignoring that distinction necessarily spell victory for anti-sexist and anti-racist political struggles. Early in Black Skin, White Masks, for example, Frantz Fanon responds to being told that he “must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from other ‘animals’ ” by vowing to “grasp [his] narcissism with both hands” (1952/2008: 12). See also Sheshadri (2012) and Weheliye (2014). We’ll be grasping at these matters and grappling with these questions throughout Ten Lessons. Here, though, let’s go back to the title of this footnote— which also hails from Hägglund—and say that the main gist of the word “antiphysis,” and hence of “the theory of historical materialism,” is that “there is no natural way for us to be” (173): the only way for any of us ever to be or become human, to participate in or perpetuate any human reality, is through the work of antiphysis, the “ongoing process of wresting form from matter” (Jackson 2020: 35). I’ll note here that the concept of “extimacy” has long played a key role in Lacanian analyses of racism. See Sheshadri-Crooks (2000); Khan (2018); Zalloua (2020); and George and Hook (2022).

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“Antiphysis” and “extimacy” are of course intimately (or extimately) related subject-matters, so much so that we might allude to Lesson Seven’s guiding sentence and say that there is no lesson in “antiphysis” that is not at the same time a lesson in “extimacy,” and vice-versa. And I will have more to say about these two big words in a moment. Here, though, I need to say a few words about the actual (which can only ever mean the political) circumstances under which I’m working on the second edition of Ten Lessons.9 Specifically, I would like (eventually) to account for the appearance of the word blackness on the list of “extimacies” given above, since that word didn’t quite make the roster in this book’s first edition. Here’s the story: Ten Lessons in Theory was originally conceived around 2009, composed over the next three years, and published in 2013, a timeframe comprising four of the eight years named in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2017 book called We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy—that is to say, four of the eight years of the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. These coinciding frameworks partially (if not tragically) account for a great deal of what I can only call short-sighted white liberal complacency on the part of yours truly when first composing Ten Lessons—particularly when actually mentioning Obama at the end of the long lesson devoted to George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Utterly oblivious to what Fred Moten calls “the announcement and enactment of Afro-pessimism,” which he considers “the most exciting and generative advance in black critical theory, which is to say critical theory” to have come around the bend “in the past decade” (2013: 737), I certainly wasn’t considering the Afropessimistic view of Hegel’s philosophical vision of “world history” as the “progress of the consciousness of freedom” (1837/1998: 402) when I breezily brushed past Hegel’s well-known exclusion of Africa (and Africans) from his progressive historical narrative and insisted that Hegel can “still help us appreciate the distance some regions of the contemporary world have come in four decades: from 1968, and an AfricanAmerican man’s risking death and dismemberment [in Memphis, Tennessee] to hold up a sign saying I AM A MAN , to 2008, and a democratic American election that permitted a man of African descent to raise his right hand and say ‘I am the President’.” I of course knew full well that some strong political “reaction” to Obama’s presidency was looming on the horizon. I was aware of the antics of what was then called the “Tea Party” and, trying to “keep it funny,” thought I was being clever to call them the white people Traumatized 9

The political in the theoretical sense exceeds our “normal” (and hence impoverished) concepts of electoral politics, political parties, and so on. Rather, theoretical writers “understand political in its deeper meaning, as describing the whole of human relations in their real, social structure, in their power of making the world” (Barthes 1957/1985: 143; Adventures: 88).

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by the Election of an African. But I didn’t take their ilk all that seriously as a rising political force. Nor did I ever imagine the day when a virulently antiimmigrant demagogue, a proudly “pussy-grabbing” candidate actually endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, would ascend to the U.S. presidency in order to “revive the lethal passions underpinning white supremacy” (Mbembe 2019: 18) and to spearhead what George Yancy calls the “unabashed reemergence of white racism within the context of a greater neo-fascist threat.”10 10

An excursus on Afropessimism: For a sober analysis of the Trumpian ascendancy, see Henry A. Giroux’s chapter on “Late Capitalism” in the BHLCT. As for Yancy’s words, they appear in his endorsement of George and Hook’s 2022 collection Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory. And since there’s a strong essay on Afropessimism in that collection—Malone and Jackson’s “Dereliction: Afropessimism, anti-blackness, and Lacanian psychoanalysis”—I’ll quote them to begin glossing that keyword: “Afropessimism,” they write, “tracks the genesis of the enslaved body through its incarnations in the experiential and institutional history of black men and women in North America. In the recounting of current instantiations of antiblackness, it articulates a desubjectivized core of nonbeing within the Black experience. This core implies a different positionality . . . within an essential rather than contingent relationship to violence. . . . It locates a category of nonbeing that exists within the production of Western subjectivity in [or as] its condition of possibility, confronting the reader politically and culturally, and pointing to an ontogenesis of the subject that is defined by a relationship to what Orlando Patterson calls ‘social death,’ which is the lot of the Black person produced and reproduced through chattel slavery” (205). Jared Sexton clarifies these matters in his 2016 essay “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” where he answers the charge that Afropessimism merely amounts to “a reductive and morbid fixation on the depredations of slavery that superimposes the figure of the slave as an anachronism onto ostensibly post-slave societies” by writing that “this assertion fails to acknowledge that one can account for historically varying instances of anti-blackness while maintaining the claim that slavery is here and now” (np). Reviewing Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism in The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham (2020) tells us that Wilderson “sketches a map of the world where Black people are always integral but excluded” and “argues that the state of slavery, for Black people, is structural and permanent” (np). Also unpacking Wilderson, Kevin Wynter writes that “Afropessimism names the vertiginous realization that anti-Blackness does not seek, nor does it desire the absence of Blackness from the world because, as it turns out, the rejuvenation and renewal of whiteness is dependent upon the destruction of Blackness and thus requires that Blackness be made perpetually available to be broken and disintegrated” (2022: 33). Meanwhile, in Becoming Human, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson elaborates on the Afropessimistic critique of “normative humanity” itself as “fundamentally antiblack” when she writes that “Antiblackness’s pliability is essential to the intransigent, complementary, and universalizing impetus of antiblack paradigms. Irrespective of the innumerable and ever-transient definitions of black identity across the diaspora, which by definition are ephemerally produced, all black(ened) people must contend with the burden of the antiblack animalization of the global paradigm of blackness, which will infringe on all articulations and political maneuverings that seek redress for present and historical violence” (2020: 19). Finally, in Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe explains that Afropessimism “is anchored to white America’s deep belief and conviction that the freedom and security of the white race can be guaranteed only at the expense of the life of nonwhites. . . . The white race might need that Other. It might depend on him, and yet, there is not much to share with this Other.

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In any case, Ten Lessons, in all its short-sighted complacency, was published in 2013 (the year George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, the year the Black Lives Matter movement was officially founded), and by academic standards the book “did fairly well”—or, I could wax Beckettian and say that it failed fairly well: there were positive reviews and a good bit of classroom adoption, for all of which, again, I’m grateful. Around 2017 (the year that neo-Nazis chanting“Jews will not replace us!” marched in in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the removal of Confederate monuments), I got the idea of putting together a “compact anthology” of primary theoretical writings (by Nietzsche, Foucault, Fanon, etc.) to serve as a “companion” text to Ten Lessons (even though Ten Lessons, tellingly, makes no mention of Frantz Fanon), and in 2019 Adventures in Theory was loosed upon the world.11 Shortly after that, I received the good news from Professor Michael Drexler that he was adopting both Ten Lessons and Adventures for his undergraduate class in critical theory at Bucknell University. And I was quite pleased to read the following description of theory, seemingly inspired by my two textbooks, in the syllabus for his class that Professor Drexler kindly sent me. Theoretical writing, he writes, may be described as the effort to defamiliarize or denaturalize how we relate to the making of meaning, the use of language, and the sources and outlets of human pleasures and suffering. It differs from other disciplinary approaches to understanding our world that may best be described through a series of negations. It is not science: it does not take for granted that reality is grounded in a pre-existing, or a priori, physical environment . . .: it is not quantitative or empiricist but radical and combative. It is not theology for it accepts no guarantor of order or predetermined future. It is opposed to myth, common sense, management, and is—at its best— anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, and antihomophobic, which may be rendered more positively as egalitarian,

11

[Afropessimism] is based on the belief that for white America to exist at all, it must continuously produce a complex of bodies in chains (Niggers). ‘Niggers’ are not only the condition of possibility for America; they are also a class of people America doesn’t want to share anything with, although without them America means nothing or not much. America, in this sense, means the impossibility of sharing freedom with others—which ‘whiteness,’ properly understood, is” (2019: 162). Mbembe goes on to say that “certain strands of Afropessimism are also premised on the idea of a racial categorical antagonism, one that cannot be transcended, or can be transcended only through a war that is and is not a mere civil war, a war that would be waged against the very concept of humanity since this concept is indeed the Trojan horse that has trapped the Negro in a permanent state of death, social or otherwise” (2019: 163). If you want to know why the new Nazis would care about old Confederate monuments, and why the old Nazis were enamored of the Jim Crow-era American South, see Staples (2017) and Whitman (2017). For a not unrelated story, see Blow (2022).

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radically democratic, and queer. Most of all, though, it is capacious, notoriously difficult, and unsettling. But it is also insistent, provocative, and exciting. This course, I hope, will be all these things.

I was of course very gratified to read this description; it pleased me to think that not only “theory” but my writing about theory was “all these things” as well—radical, combative, capacious, unsettling, insistent, provocative, exciting, etc. But while I felt then and still feel now that the book in its first edition failed fairly well at being “anti-sexist” and “anti-homophobic,” I’m quite sure today that, despite some scattered gestures, the first Ten Lessons clearly doesn’t fail very well at all at being “anti-racist.” Hence the imperative to try again, fail again, and fail better—to write a more better failed introduction to theoretical writing as anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, egalitarian, radically democratic, and queer writing about writing as the possibility of change. With this combative imperative in mind, let’s get back to antiphysis and extimacy. But let’s return to that discursive duo by way of encountering another set of interrelated critical keywords—namely, reification and abjection.

III: It don’t mean a thing if it’s not not a thing— “and in many cases a more abject thing than you may care to consider”12 “Reification” was actually the first critical keyword to be boldfaced and glossed in the first footnote in the first edition of Ten Lessons. The gloss begins like this—“Reification (from res, Latin for thing) is a Marxist term designating ‘the way that commodification reduces social relations, ideas, and even people to things’ (Parker 2008: 93)”—and then goes on to describe how writers inspired by Marx hold that the critical intellectual’s main duty is always to “negate reification” by working diligently to “dereify the language of thought” (Jameson 2009: 9). Going longer in my intro to Adventures, I spell out how reification basically means “thingification,” making things “thingy”—or, rather, making nonthings thingy, turning or attempting to turn entities that, strictly or ethically or humanely speaking, aren’t things into things. To make a big thing out of it, 12

This title mashes up a twisted allusion to a Duke Ellington tune (“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”) with a line from Lacan’s “Of Structure as an Inmixing of Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatsoever” (1970: 189).

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let’s say that reification in the largest geo-political sense involves our globally and willfully misrecognizing an actively and elusively non-thingy world as a passively graspable planet of things, inert clumps of substance there for the taking, treating not only thingy “natural resources” but non-thingy organisms (like, say, living breathing human beings) as if they were nothing but things, or objects, or property, or dirt. Reification thus helps do the dirty work of dehumanization—specifically, monetized dehumanization, what Henry A. Giroux calls “the financialization of everything” (2019: 272) human and non-human under the “late capitalist” sun. So reification marches hand in hand with alienated labor and with all historical and present day here-and-now slavery, with the highly profitable objectification, economic exploitation, and corporate commodification of living breathing human beings.13 Reification d.b.a. dehumanization can also be in cahoots with animalization, often enough the precondition of extermination, as in Kurtz’s famous scribble “Exterminate all the brutes!” in Joseph Conrad’s fictional Heart of Darkness, or as in the actual genocidal massacres featured in Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck’s 2021 docudrama entitled “Exterminate All the Brutes!”.14 On a more ideational (but still brutally political) level, reification can be said to involve our failing to face up to antiphysis, refusing to recognize all the 13

14

I’ll be saying more about Marx’s theory of alienated labor in later lessons. Here I’ll just share part of the long gloss on reification in the Dictionary of Marxist Thought, where Gajo Petrović defines reification as “the act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Reification is a special case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society” (1991: 463). “One is not born a human”: In Becoming Human, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson writes extensively about reification as the dehumanization and animalization of “black(ened) people.” But she cautions that “Recognition of personhood and humanity does not [necessarily] annul the animalization of blackness. Rather, it reconfigures discourses that have historically bestialized blackness. . . . [Dominant] forms of human recognition— inclusion in biological conceptions of the human species and the transition from native to universal human subject in law and society—are not at odds with animalization. Thus, animalization is not incompatible with humanization: what is commonly deemed dehumanization is, in the main, more accurately interpreted as the [underlying] violence of humanization” (18). Throughout Ten Lessons we’ll be studying the part that “recognition” of one’s “personhood and humanity” plays in what Jackson considers the dehumanizing “violence of humanization,” the part played by the desire for recognition in what Louis Althusser calls that “extraordinary adventure [which] transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child . . . the forced ‘humanization’ of th[at] small human animal into a man or a woman” (cited in Rubin, Adventures: 166n28)—or, elaborating from Jackson’s terms, the forced humanization of that little animal into a black(ened) or unblack(ened) or extimately antiblack(ened)—i.e.,

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anthropogenetic processes of production that make our great big “socially constructed” world possible; it involves what Fredric Jameson productively calls the forced “removal of traces of production from the product” (2010: 124); it involves our forgetting or never realizing that or how our “things” (our commodities, our cars, our cellphones, our concepts, our identities, our gods) are all indeed anthropogenetic, socially constructed, laboriously manufactured—sometimes horribly, sometimes beautifully, sometimes aesthetically, sometimes atrociously, but in any case always only ever humanly made. Still on an ideational level, reification can involve the ways we humans allow our perceptions and sensations, our metaphors and metonymies, our assumptions and projections, to congeal and harden into superhumanly dense bricks of certainty. In this sense, reification is a word that names what happens when we allow ourselves to form way too firm a “belief in the stability and substantiality of what is” (Jameson 2010: 25)—when we buy into the inevitability of any given status quo. In another, more semiotic or structurally linguistic sense, reification is a word that names what happens when we forget that words and names are not stable and substantial things, that no individual word can “mean” all by itself, stolidly indifferent to its social relations with all other words, that words can never be free-standing things-in-themselves. As for “abjection,” the gloss on that dirty word didn’t appear in the first Ten Lessons until fairly far into Lesson Four, where I tossed out the following in a relatively terse footnote: From the Latin ab-jicere, meaning “to cast out,” abjection involves the acts of psychic, social, and corporeal exclusion and expulsion by which symbolic order, cultural identity, and personal hygiene are maintained. The abject, writes Julia Kristeva, is that which “disturbs identity, system, “white”—subject. The main point or even “universal truth” to keep in mind going forward in Ten Lessons is that “humanization” is always to some degree or another forced. None of us is ever born, but all of us must become, human, and not simply human but rather, as Jackson and Althusser together spell out, a specifically categorized “type” of human, safely raced and securely gendered (at least, from the currently normative humanity’s border-guarding point of view). Of course, the more historical “truth” continues to be that the gently “forced humanization” of some little animals constitutively depends upon the more violently enforced dehumanization of others, that the healthy life of some depends upon the “social death” of others, that the happy liberty of some depends upon the immiserating enslavement of others, that some versions of “Man” can be pinnacled only when other men and women are being manacled, that some forms of human life can flourish only when others are being flushed. And though you’ll need to stay tuned to see how that last metaphor relates to the upcoming discussion of “abjection” as a “political factor,” I’ll tee it up for you by citing Slavoj Žižek writing about “Lacan’s thesis that [the little] animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement” (1994: 179).

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order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (1981: 3). Thus “filth, waste, pus, bodily fluids, the dead body itself are all abject,” for “the abject represents what human life and culture exclude in order to sustain themselves” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 1).

And then, except for a few passing glances, the term “abjection” isn’t substantially taken up again for the remainder of the book. I’ll share that I gave “abjection” short shrift in the first Ten Lessons mainly because I had written about it so effusively in my theoretical work up to then.15 While my earlier endeavors in “critical masculinity studies” and “straight queer theory” relate abjection mainly to questions of representation, to writing or “thinking through the (male) body,” here I want to focus on some other aspects of what Derek Hook calls “abjection as a political factor.”16 I want to demonstrate the concept’s relevance to antiphysis, reification, and extimacy, and, recalling that all of this key-wordy discourse is supposed to be geared toward my writing a more better failed anti-racist introduction, I want to show how “coming to terms” with these four terms combined can help us understand the role that antiblackness and/or the abjection of black(ened) people has played and continues to play in the reified social constructions of “our” modern and postmodern worlds, so that, for example, readers of Ten Lessons can better appreciate the many references to abjection, and particularly “animal abjection” (2020: 1), in Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, or so that readers will be better positioned to get what Jared Sexton is up to when he describes Afropessimism as “a meditation on a poetics and politics of abjection wherein racial blackness operates as an asymptotic approximation of that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such” (2016: np), or so that I might, as promised, account for the appearance of the word blackness—situated right next to queerness—on the list of “extimacies” that I gave you a few pages back. I can start accounting for those appearances by asking you to note the italicized emphases I’ve added to the following: Kristeva’s above-quoted claim 15 16

See Thomas (1996); (2008); (2016); (2022). “Abjection as a Political Factor” is the title of the second chapter of Hook’s 2012 A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid, which, as the title suggests, mainly investigates racism. Hook, however, writes that “the concept of abjection as applied here is not intended as providing a ‘total theory’ of racism. There is, importantly, no direct one-to-one correspondence between racism and abjection, [but] the notion of abjection [can] cast light upon certain . . . features of racism. More specifically, the notion of abjection provides a means of understanding the sociality (indeed, the ‘psychology’) of dehumanization; as such it is helpful in elucidating the societal functioning of racism at its most brutal, denigrating and objectifying” (65).

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that abjection “disturbs identity, system, [and] order”; Sexton’s just-quoted description of “racial blackness” as “that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such”; and then queer theorist Lee Edelman’s assertion (which we’ll not address till Lesson 10) that “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (2004:17). Then let’s go back to my opening gambit in Adventures—that the purpose of theoretical writing as such is to “disturb everyone”—before moving on to the description of “social abjection” that Rina Arya provides in her 2014 exploration called Abjection and Representation, where we’re informed that “fear of the other is central to abjection” and that “the fear of this other stems from within and is a deep-rooted fear of the other-in-the-self that we want to expel.” This fear of the other-in-the-self, writes Arya, may be displaced on to individuals and groups in society who are on the fringes and are stigmatized because their differences are not understood. They are seen to represent a threat, a fact that legitimizes their exclusion from the social fabric. In their otherness they are regarded as abject, lowly and despicable and, to return to etymology, are ‘cast away’ (are outcasts). Groups who at various times have been so positioned in history (but no longer necessarily remain there) include women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, AIDS sufferers, criminals, the mentally ill and lepers. These groups have all suffered discrimination and have been rejected by mainstream society because of the alleged threat that they represent in their status as ‘other’ and ‘abject,’ which points to the social (and not just psychic) dimension of abjection. (2014: 7)

Arya’s emphasis on “the social (and not just psychic) dimension of abjection” lets us circle back to Derek Hook’s insistence on “abjection as political factor.” In his social-psychological study of “the mind of apartheid,” Hook reminds us that the literal meaning of abjection (in Latin ab-jicere ) is to cast off, to repulse. In speaking of the abject, one refers to the contemptible, the repugnant, the wretched, that which is unwanted, unclean, viewed as contaminating, a danger to the moral-societal order. Abjection then, as verb, should be understood as an operation: the powerful visceral reaction toward a given object that is then denigrated, reviled. The abject, on the other hand, as noun, should be understood as the apparent source of such reactions; abhorrent, sickening, it elicits fear, moral repugnance, and is known by the physical responses, the palpable anxieties, it elicits. To be abjected . . . is the condition of being made abject. It is vital to stress

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here that abjection, as both process and condition, occurs in unison with, and as means of, recapitulating the existing societal order. (2012: 68)

Hook then goes on to quote [and supplement] a then unpublished doctoral dissertation by one M. Herbst to the effect that— the process of abjecting [an operation] . . . is an active one in which one party rejects, banishes, degrades or in some way denigrates another party; the state of being abject [a condition] . . . is what follows an act of abjection: it is a disposition, a place of exclusion . . . Without exception, the party that does the abjecting is the one in a position of power . . . while the one degraded is robbed of power and the right to societal inclusion. (Herbst, 1999, p. 16)

—before lighting on Judith Butler’s designation of the abject as “that which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement” (1990: 169) but stopping short of her ruder formulation that abjection is “the mode by which others become shit” (1990: 134). All of these matters lead me to recall a more recent articulation in which a certain individual “in a position of power” did his best to do his duty (to white nationalism) and to be the fearless leader of the main American political “party that does the abjecting” around here by demagogically describing Africans and other black(ened) peoples who desire to immigrate to the U.S. as hailing from “shithole countries.”17 But let’s forget, if we possibly can, about Agent Orange (as Spike Lee liked to call that character), and turn to some further descriptions of abjection as a way of circling back to the terms extimacy, reification, and—arguably the condition of possibility for all these operations—antiphysis. Addressing the more psychic (but never not social) dimension of abjection, Arya writes that abjection “involves the need for the self/subject to eradicate that which prevents the subject from being autonomous.” She then cites Hal Foster to the effect that “the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I . . . It is a fantasmatic substance not only alien to the subject but intimate with it—too much so in fact, and this overproximity produces panic in the subject. In this way the abject touches on the fragility of our boundaries . . .” (2014: 38). I would note the way Foster’s phrasing (involving a “not only alien . . . but [also] intimate . . . overproximity”) neatly relates abjection to extimacy—to, again, the unsettling idea that “the innermost, intimate core of a person’s 17

In How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi reports: “In an Oval Office meeting in 2018 about Black and Latinx immigrants, President Trump asked: ‘Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?’ ” (2019: 170).

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psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign ‘thing’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86), not to mention that unmentionable “coincidence of utter alterity with absolute proximity” which “brings us close to what, in ourselves, must remain at a distance if we are to sustain the consistency of our symbolic universe” (Žižek 1999/2008: 368). And I would suggest that if theories of abjection and/as extimacy and/as reification are about anything, they’re about what Foster calls “the fragility of our boundaries”; they’re about the fact that these only ever fragilely reified boundaries of ours are variously social, psychic, linguistic, corporeal, sexual, epidermal, economic, tribal, national, imperial, colonial, postcolonial, and so on. And grasping this global fact—not an “inert fact of nature” (as Edward Said in his introduction to Orientalism insists that “the Orient” is not) but a humanly produced reality—should allow us to understand a few things that anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-sexist theorists like Said have written about and against reification. Grasping this fact should allow us to understand, for example, what Aimé Césaire means when in Discourse on Colonialism he drafts the equation “Colonization=‘thingification’ ” (1955/2000: 42).”18 Comprehending the fact of reification can help us better understand why Frantz Fanon famously opens the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks called “The Fact of Blackness” with the lines “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects”—and to better sense what it might feel like to be “sealed into that crushing objecthood” (Adventures 67).19 Moreover, keeping in mind Foster’s line that “the abject is what I must get rid of in order to be an I,” I will ask you to consider another example of a would-be human who presumably “came into the world imbued the will to find a meaning in things” only to find that she, as a “she,” was already 18

19

For a strong discussion of “what real decolonization should look like,” see Adom Getachew’s “Colonization Made the Modern World: Let’s Remake It” (2020), where Getachew details how recent efforts at decolonization have involved acts of “dereification,” or “remaking” as “unmaking,” acts of “de-thingification” that involve tearing down or defacing long-standing statues monumentalizing colonizers and enslavers like Belgium’s King Leopold II, Britain’s Edward Colson, and South Africa’s Cecil Rhodes. In “Blackness and Nothingness,” Fred Moten cites a different translation of Black Skin, White Masks that renders the line “sealed into that crushing objecthood” as “locked into this suffocating reification” (2013: 771). In the original Peau Noires/Masques Blancs, by the way, Fanon’s line appears as “Enfermé dans cette objectivité écrasante” (1952: 118). Compare also these Fanonian lines from Mbembe’s Necropolitics: “Product of a history of predation, the Negro is effectively the human that was forced to don the apparel of the thing and share the destiny of the object and the tool.[. . .] Western humanism thus stands as a sort of vault haunted by the phantom of the one who had been forced to share the destiny of the object” (2019: 163).

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“meaningfully” tagged as one of those “things,” an “it” instead of an “I.” In the first paragraph of her introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Judith Thurman describes her own “coming into the world” as follows: In 1946, Simone de Beauvoir began to outline what she thought would be an autobiographical essay explaining why, when she had tried to define herself, the first sentence that came to mind was “I am a woman.” That October, my maiden aunt, Beauvoir’s contemporary, came to visit me in the hospital nursery. I was a day old, and she found a little tag on my bassinet that announced “It’s a Girl.” In the next bassinet was another newborn . . . whose little tag announced, “I’m a Boy!” There we lay, innocent of a distinction—between a female object and a male subject— that would shape our destinies. (2011: ix)

We’ll be returning throughout Ten Lessons to this anything but innocent “distinction” and others—between subject and object, “it” and “I,” self and other, body and mind, transcendence and immanence, meaning and matter, human and animal—and to the ways these interrelated oppositions continue to be globally reified along abjecting/abjected lines, continue to be oppressively raced and gendered, the way they seem to continue to draw “our boundaries” and “shape our destinies” in a world—whether “brave” and “new” or “scared” and “old”—that still must be made to mean.20 20

“This thing of darkness”: With “brave” and “new” I’ve alluded to the phrase “brave new world” as it appears in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, first performed in 1611, when European “exploration” of the “new world”—and the forced exportation of abducted Africans to that world—was already up and running (while with “scared” and “old” I was thinking mainly of “great replacement” fantasy-mongers, of American consumers of FOX News, and of “Negrophobic” opponents of Black Lives Matter of any age). I’ll be referring to The Tempest a few times in the second edition of Ten Lessons. Here, in the general context of reification, thingification, commodification, animalized abjection, racialized savagery, and the like, I’ll get the party started by highlighting a few of the locutions that appear in that play, words used by the central character Prospero and other European nobles to address or describe the play’s non-central, non-European, non-white, indigenous, or otherwise “non-human” others. Here we go: “Thou liest, malignant thing!” (1:2: 257); “Slave! Caliban! Thou earth . . . thou tortoise” (1:2: 315–19); “What things are these, my lord Antonio? Will money buy ‘em?” (5:1: 263–4); and, of course, the most famous of these lines: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” (5:1: 275–6). Some interpreters of Shakespeare assert that with that last bit Prospero is not simply claiming ownership of his “slave,” not simply saying “that darkie there belongs to me,” but bravely owning up to his own “deep-rooted fear of the other-in-the-self ” (Arya 2014: 7), freely and even graciously acknowledging the fact that he, the civilized European, is projecting or displacing his own inner “darkness,” his own inner “savagery,” onto the “savage and deformed” character named Caliban. Others find this reading overly generous. For more, see Goldberg (2004), the editors’ introduction and the essays by Takaki and Brown in Graff and Phelan (2009), and the chapter called “Caliban’s Cacophony” in Byrd (2011).

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But here we have to ask: must this always humanly fabricated world forever be misogynistically homophobically dehumanizingly antiblack? Or, given Ursula K. LeGuin’s “secular faith” that “any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings,” is there not some dim hope of our redrawing “our boundaries” and reshaping “our destinies” through “the art of words”? Through theoretical writing as a “liberatory practice of creativity”? Through what Foucault calls “the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (1969/1998: 221)? Through Cixous’s writing about “writing as the very possibility of change . . . the springboard for subversive thought” and the actual “transformation of social and cultural structures” (1975/2007: 1646)? These questions return us to the subject-matter of antiphysis.

IV: “It ain’t necessarily so” If I’ve called antiphysis the “condition of possibility” for reification, abjection, and the like, it’s only because I’m the sort of “materialist” who considers antiphysis—that is, work on or against “physical nature”—to be the condition of possibility for all of human history, for any human reality whatsoever, and thus for any “lessons” on the subject of that reality that any of us have to learn or teach. I teach the kind of materialism that Fredric Jameson says “has to do with the humanization of [the] world and [hence] its de-naturalization, that is to say, with our recognition of that entire post-natural world [i.e., human reality itself] as the product of human praxis and production” (2010: 108). I fully embrace the “anti-natural” implications of Catherine Malabou’s statement that “A reasonable materialism . . . would posit that the natural contradicts itself and that thought is the fruit of this contradiction” (2004/2008: 82)—provided that for the word “thought” we substitute the phrase “human reality itself ” and that we take “contradiction” to mean not only working or acting but also speaking or writing (diction) against (contra) “the natural.”21 I’m the kind of materialist who can’t contradict Martin Hägglund when he writes that as specifically human animals 21

There are of course many other “newer” kinds of materialism “on the intellectual marketplace today” (Jameson 2009: 61), not all of which I find particularly reasonable or enticing. For a run-down on the latest, see Christopher Breu’s long chapter on “Materialisms,” and his shorter entry on “Materialism,” in the BHLCT . For some heftylefty Hegelian/Lacanian critiques of some of those materialisms, and specifically of “object-oriented-ontology” (sometimes abbreviated as “O-O-O”), see Sbriglia and Žižek (2020). Here I’ll make a cursory judgement, and some new (materialist) enemies while I’m at it, and say that if, as per Horkheimer and Adorno, the “true concern” of critical theory is to “negate reification,” the main point of “O-O-O” is to wallow in it.

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we are subject to biological constraints—and we cannot even in principle transcend all such constraints—but we can (and do) change our relation to these constraints. There is no natural way for us to be and no [biological] species requirements that can exhaustively determine the principles in light of which we act. Rather, what we do and who we take ourselves to be is inseparable from a historical-normative framework that must be upheld by us and may be transformed by us. (2020: 177)

My largest “materialist” point here and throughout these Ten Lessons is that, despite the undeniable truth of the old bumper-sticker adage “Shit happens,” when it comes to reification, abjection, sexism, racism, antiblackness, and the like, all that shit doesn’t “just happen,” at least not “naturally”—it’s all “the product of human praxis and production”; it’s all “inseparable from a historical-normative framework” or symbolic order “that must be upheld by us” (because who else is going to do the job?) but that also “may be transformed by us” (because, again, who else is going to do the job?). Look, antiphysis basically means our “working on things,” while reification, among other things, means turning some of us into things (to profit off our labor or subject us to “social death,” to dehumanize us, or abject us, or exterminate us, or otherwise grind us into dust). But the truth of antiphysis is that it always takes work to turn human beings into things, that reification, like capitalism, like colonialism, never just naturally happens, any more than chattel slavery just naturally happens. Unless you still take Aristotle’s word for it, “there is no natural way for us to be” abjecting enslavers or the abjected enslaved.22 So while antiphysis in general always involves labor, because it

22

In the introduction to their “Critical Controversy” edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Graff and Phelan catch the renowned scholar Sir Frank Kermode seeming to use the Greek philosopher Aristotle as a critical authority to “naturalize” and hence justify Prospero’s enslavement of Caliban. Kermode is quoted as follows: “If Aristotle was right in arguing that ‘men . . . who are as much inferior to others as the body is to the soul . . . are slaves by nature, and it is advantageous to be always under government . . .’ then the black and mutilated cannibal must be the natural slave of the European gentleman, and a fortiori, the salvage [sic] and deformed Caliban of the learned Prospero” (2009: 95). Of course, Kermode isn’t asserting that “Aristotle was right” or even suggesting that Shakespeare would necessarily have believed that “Aristotle was right” in this passage. But he isn’t exactly saying that Aristotle was talking out of his arse, either. And my concern here is less with authorities like Kermode or Aristotle than with the way “authority” itself has been ideologically deployed in the history of “literary criticism” and the notably reactionary ways such criticism has been involved in the bloody history of egalitarian struggles for civil rights. I’ll be addressing this question more extensively in Lesson Seven, where I more or less suggest that the “Agrarian” American practitioners of “New Criticism,” who often took their cues from the likes of Kermode, were the lit-crit wing of the KKK.

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fundamentally is (world-forming) labor, it doesn’t necessarily require slave labor, or alienated labor, even if it has historically depended upon enslavement, and even if in its late capitalist form it continues to reify human beings into commodified things in a dazzling variety of ways. Antiphysis doesn’t necessarily reify into a metaphysics, or an essentialism, even though it often ossifies into such resolutely “absolute” meanings.23 Antiphysis doesn’t necessarily sediment into misogyny, or systemic male dominance, or cisgender hetero-patriarchy, though some autocratic dicks seem determined to “fix” the ever-shifting meanings of sex.24 Antiphysis doesn’t necessarily depend on antiblackness, either, even though today it seems particularly difficult, if not a complete waste of time, for the Afropessimistically inclined to envision when or how white “antiphysicists” are ever going to kick their antiblack habits.

23

24

Metaphysics “usually refers to philosophical attempts to establish indisputable first principles as a foundation for all knowledge” and involves belief in “the existence of absolute entities” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 186). Metaphysics also involves “belief in something unconditioned, i.e., something which would be true, absolutely and unconditionally, outside of all temporal and perspectival conditions” (Pearson and Large 2006: xxxi). See also the entry on metaphysics by Kalliopi Nikolopoulou in the BHLCT. In a related story, as Donald Wehr tells us in his entry on the term in the same Handbook, Essentialism “as a literary-critical term derives from post-structuralist theory’s insistence that philosophical efforts to identify an essence, what makes something what it is, both foster and build on linguistically mediated cultural stereotyping, thus mystifying by naturalizing invidious evaluations and hierarchies” (Wehr 2019: 475). Meanwhile, in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, Difference, Diana Fuss describes essentialism as “belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity.” For feminist theory, essentialism involves the “idea that men and women . . . are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences,” which means that feminist theory is essentially “anti-essentialist.” But as we’ll be seeing, theory in general is anti-essentialist in that it rejects “any attempts to naturalize human nature” (1989: xi). One such dick is Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who, as mentioned in the first footnote above, “banned university-level gender studies programs” in Hungary in 2018. But of course opposition to gender studies, and particularly transgender studies—not to mention transgender people—plays a major role in autocratic efforts world-wide. If “transgender studies,” as Cáel M. Keegan puts it, “grows out of [a desire for] resistance to dictated form” (2018: 3), formal dictatorships grow out of a frequently murderous “resistance” to trans and staunch opposition to what Vladimir Putin calls “so-called gender freedoms” (quoted in Boylan, 2022). Another anti-trans autocrat is Texas governor Greg Abbott, who reportedly wants to create a state in which “parents who provide their transgender teenagers with puberty-suppressing drugs or other medically accepted treatments—which doctors describe as gender-affirming care—could be investigated for child abuse” (Goodman 2022a). But Texas isn’t the lone-star anti-trans state by a long shot: according to an MSNBC report heard by yours truly, there are currently 280 pieces of anti-trans legislation being considered in 34 states across the nation. And according to another New York Times report by Goodman, “On Tuesday [3/8/2022], a bill passed the Idaho House that would make medical treatments for transgender youth a felony, punishable by life in prison” (2022b).

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In short, understanding the truth of antiphysis involves our steadily realizing that it just “ain’t necessarily so,” our holding fast to the argument that the work of antiphysis doesn’t necessarily entail reification, abjection, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, or any other extimately nasty business, because, again, none of that shit “just naturally” happens. On the other hand, our recognition that “any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings” (Le Guin), our ever-dawning awareness that any human being can work to transform any given “historical-normative framework,” our “secular faith” that this transformational work can at least be attempted, if not accomplished, through “the art of words,” doesn’t just naturally happen, either. The universal and undying truth of antiphysis is that nothing specifically human ever just naturally happens. And so, naturally, to tell the truth, the truth of antiphysis is that there’s “no natural way” for any of us ever to tell ourselves or each other “the truth.”

V: “You can’t handle the truth!” We’ve already encountered the name Nietzsche a few times in the preface thus far, and we’ll be confronting quite a few of his troublingly anti-veridical “truth-claims” about “the truth” in subsequent lessons. But we can start here by looking into the Nietzsche selection in Adventures in Theory, called “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” where we find the following unsettling bit of Q&A: What then is truth? A moveable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions. (1873/2006: 117; Adventures: 37).

Moreover, Nietzsche tells us, it is only by our forgetting that “truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions,” only by allowing our poetry and rhetoric, our metaphors and metonymies, to coagulate and petrify into eternally binding verities, “only by forgetting that [we ourselves are the] artistically creating subject[s]” of what we call our “truths,” that we the people “can live with any repose, security, and consistency” (1873/2006: 117; Adventures: 39). Thus, one of the most pressing questions that Nietzsche poses to us people is: what portion of our happiness, our serenity, our comforting sense of consistency, security, and repose, are we willing to do

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without in order to live with some declaration that we call “the truth”? What if reckoning with “the truth” hamstrings our happiness, shatters our serenity, rips up our repose, short-circuits our security, confounds our consistency? What if we can’t handle “the truth”? What if “the truth” turns out to be what we constitutionally can’t deal with, can’t work with, can’t live with? Do we sacrifice our very lives for “truth”? Or do we dispense with “truth” if it too damagingly disturbs us, depresses the hell out of us, utterly immiserates us, batters our sense of well-being, pummels our personal or political “wills to power”? The following “true story” resonates with these questions: ages ago I was teaching a sophomore-level “Humanities” course at a public university in Iowa. We were reading, among other people of (secular) faith, this wellknown trio of outright atheists: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. At a certain point in the semester a male student in the back of the class raised his right hand and, while rubbing his forehead with the other, said: “Wait a minute. Are you saying these guys are saying that this is all there is? That there’s nothing more than this?” I confirmed that that was pretty much what these steadily secular guys were saying: that “this life” is all there is. “Well,” said the student, “if I believed that that was the truth, I couldn’t go on.” I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but I might have said something like this: yes, which is precisely why you can’t afford to think that, can’t afford to think what these guys think. It would cost you too much, it could cost you “this life,” to think that “this life” is all there is, to think that the statement “this life is all there is” is “the truth.” But, in truth, whether we consciously realize it or not, most of us feel the same way you do—that is, most of us invest or “believe” in particular statements or “truth-claims” only to the degree that those utterances empower us, enhance our lives, enable us to live, allow us to feel that we can “go on.” We tend to reject or repress ideations that don’t make us feel like living: we either veer away from those particular thought patterns or let go of “this life” altogether and set our sights on some sort of self-slaughter. Now, had Nietzsche been in the house at the time, he might have hardheartedly said to this student not “You can’t handle the truth!” or even “You’re not smart enough to think like me,” but rather “You may not be strong or brave enough to believe as I believe.” Because for Nietzsche it’s less intelligence than strength and courage that are required for us to risk our repose, disturb our own peace, to recognize and accept or maybe even embrace the fact that all of our hopeful ideas about what’s more and other than “this life” can emerge only from “this life,” only from our active imaginations, that all our various dreams of what lies beyond “this life” are simply complicated lies, stories, fabrications, fictional narratives artistically created by (nobody but)

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us, that our “truths” are illusions which some of us weaker souls must forget are illusions if we want to stay (however feebly) alive and kicking. And for Nietzsche what requires the greatest strength and courage is continuing to value those illusions, those dreams, those truths, those “poetical” statements, those metaphors and metonymies, not despite but exactly because, like the anthropogenetic world itself, they are artistically created by us. In other words, Nietzsche believes in “the art of words” as much as, or more than, he values their “moral” veracity. He in fact claims that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon [i.e., a work of art] are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58). And he was actually not a big fan of the stingily honest, modern-scientific “will to truth at any cost” morality. He actually thought it kind of sad that certain contemporary “ascetic idealists” had denied themselves certain comforts, had stopped investing in ideationally deified figures (that still seemed to make life bearable for weaker psyches) simply because those twilit idols didn’t “really” exist, simply because all the “stories” we told ourselves about them weren’t, strictly speaking, “true.” And so, perhaps out of a condescending sort of compassion for the weak, but certainly in stronger sympathy with those spirits capable of handling a purely secular faith in “the art of words,” Nietzsche argued that “the will to truth requires a critique” and that “the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question” (1887/1992: 589). Now, I should say that in my understanding Nietzsche does actually believe in the possibility of truth. He actually believes that statements can be true, can be highly valued as truth, and he even seems to think that some of his own statements are incredibly valuable truth-claims (if you have the courage to find them credible, if you have, as he somewhere says, not the courage of your convictions, but the courage for an attack on all your convictions). But, in addition to believing that statements can be true, can more or less faithfully represent what is actually the case, Nietzsche, I think, also thinks that only statements can be true, that there is no such thing as “truth” outside of language, that language is never really essentially metaphysically veridical, that “language” (as Roland Barthes puts it, and as we will explore further in Lesson Three) “is by nature fictional.” So I’m going to let Nietzsche concur with the Kiowa fiction-writer N. Scott Momaday’s statement, made in a book called The Man Made of Words, that “We exist in the element of language. . . . Language is necessary to thought, and thought (as it is manifested in language) distinguishes us humans from all other creatures” (1997: 2). And I’m going to state that, if he truly believes that only as a work of art “are existence and the world justified,” Nietzsche would’ve had to value highly what one fictional character—namely, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield’s mother in the Cheyenne/Arapaho writer

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Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel There There—says here: “she told me that the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories” (58). But why at this still early stage of my relation am I going on for so long about Nietzsche, much less laboring to connect this nineteenth-century German philosopher to a couple of contemporary Native American fiction writers? I could answer that question without turning back to Tommy Orange (not to be confused with the aforementioned Agent Orange), but, like Melville’s scrivener named Bartelby, I prefer not to. So here’s the full quote from There There: With my eyes closed, I asked my mom what we were going to do. She told me we could only do what we could do, and that the monster that was the machine that was the government had no intention of slowing itself down for long enough to truly look back to see what happened. To make it right. And so what we could do had everything to do with being able to understand where we came from, what happened to our people, and how to honor them by living right, by telling our stories. She told me that the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories. (2018: 58)

And then here’s another passage from the same story, voiced by the novel’s unnamed narrator: This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff. . . . If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don’t know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep. (2018: 138–39)

I want next to connect these “fictional” or “novelistic” treatments of the imperative “to truly look back and see what happened” and to “consider history, whether you learned it right” to actual efforts on the part of wellfunded right-wing groups—with names like “Moms for Liberty” and “Parents Against Critical Theory”—to shield their spawn from what they consider

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radical left-wing “indoctrination,” from any historical information on “genocide and/or slavery,” to banish certain books from certain curricula in order for their children “to not find out, to not look too deep,” and so to protect the sleep of impressionable youth and help ensure in their youngsters a properly patriotic sense of conservative consistency, homeland security, and staunchly Republican repose.25 I first referred to these book-banning efforts in the first footnote in this preface. There I pointed out that both fictional and factual treatments of the horrors of slavery, both Toni Morrison’s Beloved—which, as she relates in her foreword to the novel, fictionalizes the historically true “story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation” (1987/2004: xvii)—and Nikole HannahJones’s The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, have been subject to right-wing attack. Here I want to focus on a few phrases found in the true story mentioned in that first footnote, Lerer and Epstein’s “G.O.P Attack on Toni Morrison Novel Inflames Virginia Contest” (2021), which describes how a libertarian mom named Laura Murphy had “pushed to have Beloved banned from her teenage son’s English curriculum”: In 2013, Ms. Murphy, who said her son, Blake, told her that the novel gave him nightmares, began lobbying for policies giving parents more control over what their children read in class. At the time, her son [reported that] he found the book “disgusting and gross” and “hard for me to handle.”

Now, while I do learn from this report that Mr. Murphy “went on to the University of Florida, spent a summer as a clerk in the [Trump] White House and now works as a lawyer for the National Republican Congressional Committee,” I don’t know if he actually ever had his pillow fluffed “on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres.” I don’t know for sure that young Blake

25

I imagine that the anti-C.R.T. outfit “Parents Against Critical Theory” dropped the word “Race” from their self-nomination for the sake of acronymic acrimony, to form a “more perfect union,” which is to say a more perfectly right-wing PACT. Or maybe they read the self-identified “black motherfucker” Fred Moten’s essay “Blackness and Nothingness,” which refers to “black critical theory, which is to say critical theory . . .” (2013: 738,737), which is Moten’s way of saying that “theory” needs to be “black” to be truly “critical,” and they took the critically black motherfucker’s word for it that all “critical theory” is “black” to begin with, so there was no real need to “play the race card” in their title. Then again, nah, I really don’t think any of the mommies and daddies in PACT have ever brushed up against Fred Moten.

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was “born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery.” Hell, I don’t know for sure whether any of my ancestors directly benefited from those atrocities, either. But I would offer that since neither Blake nor yours truly happen to be BIPOC, since neither of us are noticeably Black or Indigenous Persons of Color, since probably few if any of our ancestors were ever enslaved, segregated, relocated, exterminated, or characterized as having hailed from “shithole countries,” there have definitely been benefits for us both.26 But I also believe there would be great benefits for us all—or at least for all of us in the U.S. who don’t want to stay tethered to the lost cause of global white supremacy—if we could somehow manage to stop silencing the past, try to reckon with racism, to read some damn books, to “truly look back to see what happened,” maybe even start learning to “handle the truth” about “genocide and/or slavery,” to “learn it right” in order to “make it right.”27 But given the ways some of his “truths” have been handled (or mangled) by the “far-right”—from his anti-Semitic sister, to Hitler and his henchmen, to the MAGA-hatted conspiracy theorists and purveyors of “post-truth” who powerfully populate the media-scapes of late capitalism—can we really still make good use of Nietzsche in our efforts to “make good trouble,” to reckon with history, to “learn it right” and “make it right”? Or, more to the point, can I still make good use of the anti-veridical Nietzsche in my effort to rewrite Ten Lessons in Theory? I’ve already owned up to my short-sighted complacency when trotting out Hegel in the first edition of this book, how I failed to envision the ascendancy of Agent Orange and, to say it again, “the unabashed reemergence of white racism within the context of a greater neo-fascist threat” (Yancy 2022). Here I’ll acknowledge that back when I was following Nietzsche’s famous “there are no facts, only interpretations” line in this book’s fourth lesson, I hadn’t dreamt of a near future in which “alternative facts” 26

27

I’ve never had any DNA-based “ancestry” work done, but I gather from various family sources that I’m ancestrally Dutch, Welsh, and, on my paternal grandmother’s side, ever so slightly Cherokee. But that light touch of indigeneity doesn’t exactly free my Georgiaborn ass from the burdens of Southern history, for some of my more prosperous tribal forebears were also enslavers who took their Black “property” with them when they were forced by Andrew Jackson onto the Trail of Tears. For more on this complicated story, see Walker (2021) and Miles (2021). Suggested reading for this project would include not only There There, Beloved, and The 1619 Project but Kendi (2016) and (2019); Gordon (2022); Dunbar-Ortiz (2014); Lindqvist (1992); and Trouillot (1995). The last three form the textual basis for Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s already mentioned “Exterminate All the Brutes!” If you can’t view Peck’s film (because you don’t have access to HBO), you should at least read Ito (2021). I can note that at one point in the film the director in voice-over can be heard to ask “Why am I making this film?” and then to provide this pointed (at Agent Orange) answer: “because I come from a shit-hole country.”

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would threaten to win the day. I hadn’t dreamt of a specific day (January 6, 2021) when a blatantly false but very “Big Lie” would lead to an actual armed insurrection, nor of a twilit evening when “experimentally” calling the value of “truth” into question might actually entail calling off the American experiment in democracy altogether. In short, I had not envisioned a future time when Timothy Snyder’s ominous truth-claim “Post-truth is pre-fascism” (2021) would seem not only valid but dated. But I’m not going to blame Nietzsche, much less my less-than-foresightful employment of his insights, for what has happened in America at the time of this writing, nor for whatever may have transpired in the dark fields of the republic by the time you read these words. He might not be our most obvious ally in the fight against racism or the will to speak truth to white power, but I’d like to think that Nietzsche the man would have never sported a swastika, nor worn a white hood, nor donned a blood-red MAGA hat. In any case, I’m pretty sure that past, present, and future “Parents Against Critical Theory” wouldn’t want you reading his Genealogy of Morals any more than they’d want you studying all the artistically (and combatively) created “truth-claims” that comprise Ten Lessons. Which is why yours truly still hopes you’ll find these lessons “something worth reading,” still feels like trying to uphold the truth of these claims, to strengthen and broaden the art of these sentences, to keep telling and retelling these “stories about stories,” to keep writing and rewriting this writing about “writing as the very possibility of change.”

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in the Preface: critical race theory, antiphysis, historical materialism, anthropogenesis, linguistic determinism, semiotic materialism, the subject, extimacy, the political, Afropessimism, reification, abjection, metaphysics, essentialism

Introductory Matters: What Theory Does, Why Theory Lives

I: “Theory is [still undead] everywhere” On the first page of his book The Literary in Theory, veteran theorist Jonathan Culler takes up the question of his discipline’s decline. Admitting that “the heyday of so-called high theory” is over, Culler concedes that “the activities that have come to answer to the nickname theory are no longer the latest thing in the humanities” (2007: 1). Many observers in and of the humanities would agree with Culler’s assessment. Some have concluded, and not exactly sadly, that theory has had it, that “theory is dead” (2007: 1). Others—who had never been all that fond of “the activities” Culler designates anyway—no doubt believe that “this thing called theory” (Surin 2011: 6) never should have “lived” in the first place, that “the thing” never should have gained its prominence in literary studies, much less its supposed dominance of the field. Thus Kenneth Surin, reporting on theory’s (then-present) condition in a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly entitled “Theory Now,” describes a “presumed or merely posited ‘after’ of theory, now fashionable in certain parts of the profession (as in ‘the days of theory are over, so let’s get back to doing literary studies in a way that really focuses on novels, plays, and poems, etc.’).” Surin also describes the long-smoldering “ressentiment of intellectual conservatives who detest theory because for them it ensued in the alleged sidelining of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, and so on (as in ‘how dare you place this Egyptian or Pakistani novelist in the same literary-analytical framework as Faulkner or Günter Grass?’)” (2011: 3). Here Surin alerts us to two related aspects of the death-wish against theory: theory-haters hate theory and are more than happy to think it dead because “the thing” in its heyday “decentered” literary studies, spoiling intellectually conservative parties either by taking the focus away from novels, poems, and plays as novels, poems, and plays (in order to harp on supposedly “non-literary” or “sociological” matters like race, gender, and 1

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class), or by staying more or less in the literary ballpark but sidelining the canonical figures of Great Literature’s all-star team (Surin’s famously named white male players), sticking in a slew of non-white and perhaps non-male “others” in their stead (Surin’s unnamed and ungendered Egyptians and Pakistanis). But let’s not fail to mention a third, “aesthetic” or “stylistic” factor in the longstanding resentment against theory: the obstreperous complaints about the sheer ugliness of theoretical writing, its abrasively off-putting opacity, its dependence on “specialized terminology” and “in-group jargon,” cumbersome “critical keywords” (like the slew you’ve already seen glossed in the Preface) that not only sound unlovely to belletristic ears but refuse all quick and nimble definition. Little wonder, then, given such unforgiven trespasses against all the finer things in academic life, if no few “intellectual conservatives” or other denizens of the “I love literature crowd” think their world a better place for theory’s being dead.1 But while the actual extent of its dominion over literary studies, or the exact duration of its heyday, or the aesthetic, ethical, or political value of its stylistic infractions against clarity and grace may all be open to debate, it’s surely (still) premature for intellectuals (or anti-intellectuals) of any stripe to mourn or celebrate the expiration of theory, to wring or clap our hands about theory’s demise. Like it or not, “the thing” still lives. Theory persists. Theory abides. Granted, the activities that answer to the nickname “theory” may no longer be the latest thing in the humanities, but they do seem to have become lasting things. They endure—though not, let’s note, as stony monuments of unageing intellect or otherwise solidified things (after all, resisting reification remains one of theory’s most vital and pressing assignments).2 Rather, 1

2

In his chapter on “Antitheory” in the BHLCT, Vincent B. Leitch writes that “What characterizes many of the antitheory factions . . . are arguments calling for a return to the close reading of canonical literature, for clear writing of critical prose that avoids obscurity and jargon. . . . Antitheorists often complain bitterly about contemporary theory’s commitment to social constructionism (vs. scientific truth and objectivity), to multiculturalism and its focus on race-class-gender analyses, and to ideology critique and the demystification of great literature. For their part, theorists refer to antitheorists as the ‘I love literature crowd’ ” (2019: 343). For more on the academic hatred of theory, see the 2019 collection What’s Wrong with Antitheory?, which, like the BHLCT, is edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo. As discussed in the Preface, reification (from res, Latin for thing) is a Marxist term designating “the way that commodification reduces social relations, ideas, and even people to things” (Parker 2008: 193). Theoretical writing exposes and opposes this baleful reduction to commodified thing-iness and attempts, against heavy odds, to rescue itself and its objects of analysis from reification, to keep itself unreified. For some theoretical writers, this effort against reification actually constitutes “theory” as such. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of the founding documents of contemporary critical theory, Horkheimer and Adorno write that “Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification. It

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theoretical activities continue as, precisely, activities, actions, restlessly critical procedures producing “insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix). Extending its shelf-life beyond any number of sell-by dates, theory survives as a battery of disturbing questions, an unsettling set of strategies for enabling what Culler calls “reflection on meaning as a problem rather than a given” (2007: 85). Given reasonable suspicion that “meaning” may never cease to be a “problem,” given reasonable confidence that there will never spring from the earth nor fall from the sky some “completely meaningful” and universally satisfying answer that would lay all critical inquiry to eternal rest, given reasonable doubt that “common sense, or even reification itself, can ever permanently be dissipated” (Jameson 2009: 4), one might brashly forecast that “this thing called theory” will go on forever—or at least for as long as “the humanities” remain a going concern within a human reality (or a functioning democracy) still “constantly in the making” (Beauvoir 1949/2011: 44). For even if “theory itself is [no longer] seen as the cutting edge . . . of literary and cultural studies,” even if theory is no longer considered “prominent as a vanguard movement” within these fields, the fields themselves nonetheless

must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make [sic] people smarter and more stupid at once” (1947/2002: xvii). More recently, in Valences of the Dialectic, Fredric Jameson writes “that theory is to be grasped as the perpetual and impossible attempt to dereify the language of thought, and to preempt all the systems and ideologies which inevitably result from the establishment of this or that fixed terminology.” And yet, because the working lexicon of any theory can coagulate into a “fixed terminology”—the word “reification” has, for example, a specific and precise if not “fixedly” economic meaning in the language of Marxist thought—Jameson warns that any “theoretical process of undoing terminologies [can], by virtue of the elaboration of the terminology that very process requires, become . . . an ideology in its own turn and congeal into the very type of system it sought to undermine.” Thus Jameson notes “the hopelessness of the nonetheless unavoidable aim of theoretical writing to escape the reifications [and] commodifications of the intellectual marketplace today” (2009: 9). As these two examples of “theoretical writing” qua writing against reification should suggest, to say that theory was ever “the latest thing in the humanities” or to characterize theory, as I have above, in the mercantile terms of “shelf-life” and “sell-by dates” is to leave it open to the charge of having failed to stay frosty against reification, as if theory had never been anything more than a steaming chunk of cultural capital, a hotly commodified intellectual amusement, rather like a computer game requiring “advanced” skills but very little wisdom, a product making “consumers” (teachers and students) at once “smarter” (more technically savvy) and “stupider” (less perceptive about their actual conditions of existence and hence more compliant with the dominant—reified and reifying—social order). As for theory’s hopeful project of successfully “dereifying the language of thought,” Jameson soberly suggests that “theory” cannot “expect to supplant the multitudinous forms of reified thinking and named and commodified thoughts on the intellectual marketplace today, but only to wage persistent and local guerilla warfare against their hegemony” (2009: 61).

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“take place within a space articulated by theory, or theories, theoretical discourses, theoretical debates.” Those of us who still work “in the humanities” are “ineluctably in theory,” as Culler writes, for, at least in the humanities, “theory is everywhere” (2007: 3, 2). Or, as Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it in The Future of Theory, “theory never stops coming back” (2002: 10).3 Far from having kicked the bucket, then, theory is resolutely undead, permanently relevant and perpetually revenant—if not “everywhere” that can be imagined, then at least in and to “the humanities” as they are still being imagined and re-imagined in still-democratic societies. For in Culler’s words the position of theory as an institutional and disciplinary presence now seems well established in the American university . . . It now seems widely accepted that any intellectual project has a basis in theory of some sort, that graduate students need to be aware of theoretical debates in their fields and able to situate themselves and their work within the changing intellectual structures of the professional landscape, and that theory, far from being ‘too difficult’ for undergraduates, is the sort of thing they ought to explore as one of the most exciting and socially pertinent dimensions of the humanities” (Culler 2011: 224).

Ten Lessons in Theory hopes to serve participants in the humanities at all levels as an introduction (and an inducement) to theoretical writing as writing against reification, writing against the commodification of writing and of thought. Of course, resisting the commodification of writing in writing isn’t always easy, especially not if one (like yours truly) feels compelled, for professional reasons, to present the putative resistance in a commodified form—to publish, that is, one’s writing as a book that one “naturally” hopes will be commercially successful, i.e., “widely adopted” as a textbook. And of course there are many textbooks, many introductions and inducements to theory, available in “the intellectual marketplace today” (Jameson 2009: 61). Most of these begin with matters of definition; they attempt to describe what theory is and to provide an historical narrative about how this thing came to be such a strong (or insidious) “institutional and disciplinary presence.” In this introduction, however, we’ll be concerned less with what theory is and more with what theory does. Our most vital concern will be with the question

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Or, as Jeffry R. Di Leo more recently puts it in his introduction to the BHLCT, “Theory is stronger now than it ever was in the twentieth century. The reason for this is not necessarily a deepening or intensification of the work of theory in traditional areas such as literary criticism and critique (though arguments may be made here), but rather a widening or broadening of its reach and domain” (2019:1).

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of why theory (still) lives or why theory (still) matters, why theory still excitingly pertains not only to students “of the humanities” but to all “the undead”—to everyone who still participates in our specifically human reality (if only in the spectral form of writing). Culler, for one, writes that theory can be understood as an interdisciplinary “genre of works,” as a “name for a mixture of philosophy, psychoanalysis, linguistics, aesthetics, poetics, and political and social thought” (2011: 230). But maybe we should think of theoretical writing less as an institutionally generic thing (even an academically mixed-up thing) than as an “exciting and socially pertinent” activity: for Culler, what theory is is the activity of “thinking about thinking”; correspondingly, in his words, the “impetus to theory is a desire to understand what one is doing” when one is thinking. Culler thinks that theory, as a particularly challenging way of “thinking about thinking,” is driven by the impossible desire to step outside one’s thought, both to place it and to understand it, and also by a desire—a possible desire—for change, both in the ways of one’s own thought, which always could be sharper, more knowledgeable and capacious, more self-reflecting, and in the world our thought engages. (2011: 224–5)

Here Culler’s thinking (about thinking) about theory in terms of a desire for change “in the ways of one’s own thought” might make one think of my repetitive insistence on theoretical writing as writing about writing as the possibility of change. His thinking might also cause us to think about this bit of thinking from Michel Foucault: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (1986: 7). But thinking about theoretical writing in terms of a desire for change—change not simply in our own individual modes of cognition but “in the world” itself—might also bring to mind the revolutionary slogan carved in marble at the tomb of Karl Marx: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (1845/1978: 145). Culler’s thinking, however, leads him to quote a more densely packed sentence from Michael Hardt, who, in an essay called “The Militancy of Theory,” writes that “the task of theory is to make the present and thus to . . . invent the subject of that making, a ‘we’ characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (2011: 21). Culler goes on to suggest that Hardt here “makes explicit what is only implicit in a lot of theory: the attempt to produce a collective subject, a ‘we,’ through argument about how things should be conceived or understood” (2011: 225).

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Now, while Hardt clearly owes his militancy to writers like Marx and Foucault, his quoted sentence might require a bit more “unpacking” than either one of theirs. And indeed we’ll be returning throughout Ten Lessons to the question of what it might mean to argue (1) that what Hardt calls “the present” is never simply given but must always be made; (2) that a collectively subjective “we” both belongs to and is responsible for making “the present” historical moment; (3) that the “we” in question must itself be invented or produced; and (4) that theoretical writing can be actively involved in this vital task, this “antiphysical” work of our self-actualizing “the world,” of our restlessly producing the very subject of human reality—in other words, “ourselves.” As I said, Hardt’s sentence calls for strenuous and extended unpacking. Here, though, let’s linger on that last phrase from Culler concerning the desired “production” of this collective “subject,” a certain “we ourselves” that somehow gets produced “through argument about how things should be conceived or understood,” and let’s ask ourselves how, in theory, things arguably should be conceived or understood. What’s the difference between the way things should theoretically be conceived or understood and the normal or given way in which things are commonly conceived or understood? Moreover, how does our recognizing this difference—this discrepancy between the good or rich or productive understanding that arguably should be and the bad or impoverished or reified understanding that commonly is— impel us toward what Slavoj Žižek blithely calls “insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (2006: ix)? What allows a writer like Žižek to propose that “our common perceptions” really should be “short-circuited,” as he puts it, that those perceptions really ought to be utterly shattered and undermined?4 These questions bring us back to the matter of “reification,” and to Horkheimer and Adorno’s insistence that the “true concern” of any bona fide intellectual work is “the negation of reification” (1947/2002: xvii). For theorists like Žižek and Hardt, who write in the critical tradition of Horkheimer and Adorno (and so of Hegel and of Marx), “reification” and its “common-sense” confederates pose fairly formidable obstacles to theory’s

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Žižek explains that “a short circuit occurs when there is a faulty connection in the network—faulty, of course, from the standpoint of the network’s smooth functioning. Is not the shock of short-circuiting, therefore, one of the best metaphors for a critical reading?” This critical short-circuiting, writes Žižek, “is what Marx, among others, did with philosophy and religion” and “what Freud and Nietzsche did with morality.” Žižek writes that “the aim of such an approach is . . . the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed presuppositions and consequences” (2006: ix).

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most militant task, diligently working to try to block “our” collective and transformative remaking of the present historical moment. For whenever “we” find ourselves doing the business of “thinking” within an utterly reified social order—the current “neoliberal” capitalist “mode of production,” for example, “a world in which corporate Capital [has] succeeded in penetrating and dominating the very fantasy-kernel of our being” (Žižek 1993: 10)— chances are pretty good that “our common perceptions” of that social order, not to mention of “our being,” will be “reified” themselves, and thus the odds of our finding ways to use our critical imaginations against that order, of our imaginatively keeping open “the difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be,” can grow quite dismally slim. Arguably, our habituated tendency to conceive or understand “things as they are” in our given human reality as things—specifically, as commodities to be purchased (if only we can afford them), and not as productively human and collectively humanizing processes—is symptomatic of “our” pervasive cognitive and affective reification today. For are we not commonly “encouraged” by “corporate Capital” to conceive absolutely “everything” imaginable in commodified or globally “free market” terms, and to perceive “ourselves,” in our very being, as primarily and essentially consumers (with or without purchasing power) rather than as subjectively collective makers of the present, much less as “citizens of the world” empowered and engendered by the very work of our own self-reflective understanding? Theory, as Culler notes, is indeed driven by the desire for change both in ourselves and of “the world,” and so the task of theory, as Hardt insists, is indeed to make the present—or better, to participate in the radical transformation of the present by negating regnant reifications, by working to shatter and undermine our common and congealed perceptions, particularly the all too common-sense view that “we ourselves” are not the actual (and sole) producers of our present (and future) human realities but merely passive consumers of “things as they are,” customers who are “always right” (to think of themselves as customers) and who are thus all too well accustomed to taking or buying into “the world” as given.

II: The problem with givens Describing what he calls “the duty of the critical intellectual,” and using the words “theory” and “philosophy” interchangeably, Žižek writes that philosophy begins the moment we do not accept what exists as given . . . but raise the question of how is what we encounter as actual also possible.

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Ten Lessons in Theory What characterizes philosophy is this “step back” from actuality into possibility. . . . Theory involves the power to abstract from our starting point in order to reconstruct it subsequently on the basis of its presuppositions, its transcendental “conditions of possibility” (1993: 2).

Žižek, then, would agree with Culler that theory’s central task is to reflect “on meaning as a problem rather than a given” (Culler 2007: 85). But how might this job-description relate to the more militant claim that theory’s most serious task is negating reification? Since both activities would seem to constitute the real work of theoretical writing, shouldn’t we ask how reflecting on “meaning as a problem rather than a given” and “negating reification” might be practically related? The quick answer to this question would of course be that “taking meaning as a given” essentially equals accepting or “buying into” reification. But since we wouldn’t be doing our homework if we were simply to accept that quick answer, take that neat equation as a given, we must rather address it as a problem. We must explore its problematic “conditions of possibility.” To proceed with this labor, let’s put aside the term “reification” for a moment and focus instead on this tension between “the given” and “the problematic” in the domain of so-called “meaning.” Let’s ask what it might mean to reflect on “meaning” as a problem and not a given. What might it mean to take some specific instance of meaning “as a given” in the first place? Well, even in our common understanding, wouldn’t our accepting any piece of meaning as “a given” actually mean our taking its “actuality” pretty easily, with little or no questioning about its conditions of possibility? And wouldn’t that “easiness” entail that the more we take a particular piece of “meaning” as “a given” the fewer the questions we’re likely to raise about it? What “given meanings” would thus seem to be given is a facile sort of freedom from analysis, a reprieve from “thinking about thinking,” a sort of well-lubricated immunity from any abrasive “problematization.” In theory, however, no meaning should ever be taken as a given. No piece of meaning, no particular idea, ever gets a free pass. Or perhaps in theoryworld the only idea that might safely be taken as a given is the idea that no idea should ever be so taken. The only idea that isn’t open to question, the only idea that isn’t problematic, is the idea that any idea can and should be frequently and vigorously problematized, if not completely shattered and undermined. But let’s consider a specific example of a “given” whose license to be taken as “given” theoretical writing has attempted to revoke. For quite some time, “in the humanities” and elsewhere, it was taken as a given that the word “Man” simply meant all the human beings in the history of the world—the total “horizon of humanity,” as Jacques Derrida once put it (1972/1981b: 116). The

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usage ranges from early to late modernity, from Prince Hamlet’s “what a piece of work is man” (Hamlet 2.2. 303) to Karl Marx’s “man makes religion; religion does not make man” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 15) to astronaut Neil Armstrong’s moonwalking, indefinite-article-dropping soliloquy describing “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”5 The “given” here is (or was) that the word “Man” could unproblematically or transparently represent all human earth-dwellers universally—even though at any given time well over half the humans in the world aren’t exactly men, and even though only a minority of actual men or women on the planet resemble the generically “Western” or “Anglo-European” imago that tends to be conjured by the word “Man.”6 Taking this “blanched” meaning of the word “Man” as “a given” has always tended to involve “our” either ignoring these contradictions or not seeing them as causing “us” any problems (and anyone who does have a problem with it probably ain’t “one of us”). Another example: For some time, “in the humanities” and elsewhere, it was taken as a given that the word “Woman” could be deployed to designate not some individual female adult or the entirety of the human group “women” (and not anything like “the total horizon of humanity,” to be sure) but rather some “universal” and eternal “essence” of “womanliness” or “femininity” (a “universality” that of course excluded those females who were, as Homi Bhabha puts it, considered “almost the same, but not white”—or not at all the same because not white, an exclusion leading to the question “Ain’t I a Woman?” posed by a Black woman named Sojourner Truth). This very blanched meaning of the “truth” of the word “Woman” could be and was long taken as a given despite rather glaringly evident tensions between the essentialist determination “Woman” (which for some reason usually involved not simply the possession of whiteness and a functioning uterus but such “helpful” and supposedly “innate” dispositions as passivity, masochism, or infinite willingness to self-sacrifice) and the diversely intersectional characteristics, situations, experiences, embodiments, activities, aspirations, and desires of all the world’s mujeres.7 Considering these two examples together, then, we might belabor the obvious: that the heretofore “given” meanings of “Man” and “Woman” have 5

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I’ve heard that Armstrong insisted that he didn’t really screw up his line by dropping the “a” in front of “man” when he took his own small step but that a sound-glitch kept those of us back on Earth from hearing him nail it. In the chapter called “Of Mimicry and Man” in his book The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha nicely specifies one of the key differences between “Man” and most actual men by rewriting the phrase “almost the same, but not quite” as “almost the same, but not white” (1994: 89). As bears repeating, in Essentially Speaking, Diana Fuss describes essentialism as “belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity.” For feminist theory, essentialism involves “the idea that men

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long involved a pervasive social inequality, that what this particular “given” has historically given “us” is the strong impression that the phrase “Man and Woman” has always meant and should forever inevitably mean the hierarchical difference between the one’s taking giant steps and the other’s being stepped on or over. In other words, here the “given meaning” has done its bit to “naturalize” or “inevitable-ize” or “eternalize” cisgender heteropatriarchy or systemic (and usually systemically racist) male dominance. If the situation today has to some extent been altered—at least “in the humanities,” if not elsewhere, and thanks mainly to intersectional feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theorists—then the words “Man” and “Woman” are no longer employed quite so facilely in these naturalized and essentialized senses, no longer taken quite so broadly as givens. As these examples suggest, what theory does when reflecting “on meaning as a problem rather than a given” is to foreground the tensions or contradictions embedded in the “meaning” under review. We might note, for another example, a sort of contradiction in Culler’s very phrase, for arguably one actively reflects on “meaning” only as a problem—that is, critically “reflecting on” and “problematizing” are pretty much the same procedure—whereas to take meaning “as a given” is precisely not to reflect on it but merely to reflect it, to repeat and reproduce it, like a mirror, without question, without friction. In this sense, successfully “given” meaning is (rather like a sexually transmitted disease) the gift that keeps on giving. If I myself should take some sliver of meaning as given, I will probably expect you to partake as well, to “repeat after me,” to join me as I have joined others in a reified set of “common perceptions,” a coagulated sort of “common sense,” “a stagnant confirmation of inherited thinking, its presuppositions, and its dogma” (Derrida 2008: 120). Theory, however, like the 1980’s glam-rock band Twisted Sister, is “not gonna take it.” In actively reflecting on meaning as problem, theoretical writing attempts to disrupt or short circuit the reproduction of “common sense.” Theory, writes Culler, must always engage in the “critique of common sense, of

and women . . . are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences.” Theory is “anti-essentialist” in that it rejects “any attempts to naturalize human nature” (1989: xi). In her chapter on “Intersectionality” in the Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory. Aida Hurtado notes that the term intersectionality emerges from the “legal arena” and most directly from the work of “law professor and African American scholar” Kimberlé Crenshaw. Hurtado writes that “as Crenshaw’s writings elucidate, the consideration of gender and race, and how these categories intersect, is critical to understanding that women in the United States and around the world are subjected to multiple sources of oppression. Crenshaw’s intervention was part of the growing chorus in feminist scholarship and feminist organizing asserting that the feminisms developed by such influential figures as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem could not be applied without modification to all groups of women” (161).

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concepts taken as natural” (1997:15). Theoretical writers in fact decline to take any human activities “naturally,” for “as long as one assumes that what one does is natural it is difficult to gain any understanding of it” (Culler 1975:129). And, as Michael Bérubé puts it, troping off Upton Sinclair, “It is very difficult to get a man to understand something when his tribal sense of his identity depends on his not understanding it. But,” Bérubé adds, “there are few tasks so urgent” (2011: 74)—few tasks so urgent or arduous as trying to get ourselves to understand arguments that our “tribal” or inherited sense of identity, our stable or “naturalized” common sense, necessitates our not understanding.8 Fredric Jameson thus writes of the daunting “un-naturality” of theoretical writing, “its provocative and perverse challenge to common sense as such” (2009: 4). Abrading any and all “natural” or common-sense assumptions, theoretical writing promotes instead an unnatural and uncommon sensibility, an extraordinary or even anti-ordinary understanding. Theory, that is, endeavors to defamiliarize all the settled normalities of the given world.9 And this “creative abrasion” (Hall 2003: 71) of “common sense” constitutes the primary reason theoretical writing isn’t often “easily understood”: theoretical writing is by definition hostile to “normal” understanding and to the familiar versions of “the normal world” such understanding attempts to secure, and this very hostility makes it difficult for us to be secure in our understanding of theory.10

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Upton Sinclair’s line is “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” But given the way our reified and commodified identities pretty much depend upon our salaries (and vice-versa) under the rule of late capitalism, given the ways “in which corporate Capital [has] succeeded in penetrating and dominating the very fantasy-kernel of our being” (Žižek 1993: 10), Bérubé’s reworking of Sinclair’s line seems pretty apt. For Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky, defamiliarization (ostranenie, or “making strange”) defines not theoretical writing but literary discourse as such. For Shklovsky, whose 1917 essay “Art as Technique” appears early in Adventures in Theory and will be considered more thoroughly in Lesson Seven, literature “defamiliarizes” in that it “disrupts ordinary language and habitual modes of perception.” The term describes “literature’s ability to disrupt through its representation of reality the dominant ideas of society” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 76). For Shklovsky, “defamiliarization” pertains to “literature” and not “theory” per se, but contemporary theoretical writers often employ this word to argue that theoretical writing performs the most radical work of literature, as for example when Jameson writes that the aim of theoretical writing is “to defamiliarize our ordinary habits of mind and to make us suddenly conscious not only of our own . . . obtuseness but also of the strangeness of reality as such” (2009: 50). To make this not easily understood argument even less understandable, let’s borrow and alter some language from Jean-Luc Nancy and write that “If the strictest [and strangest] formulations of [theory] often inspire perplexity, annoyance, and refusal, it is because . . . these formulations . . . wish to make understood that they cannot be, as they are, understood by [our normal] understanding, but rather demand that [such] understanding relinquish itself ” (2002: 63). Nancy’s words, which actually concern Hegel, will appear again in unaltered form in a footnote in Lesson Six, which also concerns Hegel.

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We’ll return to the matter of theory’s alienating “difficulty” anon. Here, though, let’s pause to mull over yet another contradiction, this one located in my own exposition of theory’s self-reflections. A moment ago, I gave you “Man” and “Woman” as examples of “meanings” that had until recently been taken as givens in the humanities but that had gotten themselves roundly “problematized” at the hands of “high theory.” My intent was to offer the following as quick examples of theoretical “problematizations” of these given terms. In regard to “Man,” I intended to quote from the final pages of The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, where Michel Foucault writes that “man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge,” that “man is an invention of recent date,” that the invented convention of man is “perhaps nearing its end,” and that the figure of man will someday “be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (1966/1973: 386, 387). But I intended to stress that when Foucault heralds the erasure of “man,” he isn’t predicting or calling for the extinction of the human species; rather, Foucault is signaling that a particular figure of meaning that had for some time been taken as the most central and meaningful figure in “the human sciences” and humanism in general now no longer could or should be.11

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Excursus on humanism and its discontents: Childers and Hentzi write that “in current critical debates humanism usually refers to an anthropocentric view of the world that asserts the existence of a universal human nature informing all actions and decisions” (1995: 140). “Anti-humanist” theorists don’t hate humans but question the existence of any such “universal human nature” or at least reject “Man” as this universal’s standardbearer. Specifically, “feminists, black activists, postcolonial critics, and gay and lesbian critics have argued that the ‘man’ at the heart of humanism is not free of the limitations of limiting interests resulting from the specifics of a particular gender, class, race, or sexual orientation; on the contrary, this ‘man’ is male, white, middle-class, Anglo, and heterosexual. For these critics, the attempt to pass off such a limited viewpoint as universal is covertly, if not overtly, oppressive” (1995: 141). Anti-humanist or posthumanist writing thus desires, as Derrida puts it, to “pass beyond man and humanism” (1966/1978: 292). For one of the most compelling efforts that I’ve encountered to “pass beyond man and humanism” and towards more just and inclusive ways of “becoming human,” see Wynter (2003). I also like the way Zahi Zalloua refuses the “logic of the either/or” at the end of his chapter on “Posthumanism” in the BHLCT. Zalloua writes that “To the question, ‘Human or Posthuman?’ we must answer ‘Yes, please!’ ” (2019: 318). See also the entries on “Humanism” and “Antihumanism,” both by Allen R. Dunn, in the BHLCT . As for myself, when I read Dunn write that “Humanists continue to differ most dramatically from their antihumanist critics in their optimistic faith in the human ability to change the world” (2019: 372), I can only conclude that my own critical disposition isn’t exactly antihumanist, because it seems to me that what makes us human (not humanist, but human) must always involve the possibility of what Hägglund calls “spiritual freedom,” must always involve this “ability to change the world,” or at least to try to preserve what’s left of our ability to discern the difference “between things as they are

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Regarding “Woman,” I intended to point out that when Jacques Lacan proclaims that “Woman does not exist” (1975/1998: 7) he is not stupidly positing that there are no women in the world. Rather, he’s asserting that “Woman”—specifically the eternally, masochistically self-sacrificing “Woman”—is “essentially” a fiction, a pathologically self-serving male fantasy.12 I also intended to explain that when Monique Wittig avers that a “lesbian” is “not a woman” (1981/2007: 1642) she doesn’t mean that “lesbians” are not “chromosomally female” or don’t “have vaginas,” etc., but rather that “woman” is a political category invented by men for the purpose of maintaining systemic male dominance, and that lesbians (or at least some lesbians) self-definitionally refuse the category as well as the system (not to mention the men). But here’s the problem. By introducing these particular examples, I basically wanted to tout my investment in feminist, psychoanalytic, and queer disturbances of the “given” meanings of gender and sexuality as among the most excitingly and politically pertinent activities that theoretical writing brings to the table. And yet, in the very gesture of offering these examples, in the order given, I unintentionally reproduced one of the primary “givens” of masculinist privilege itself. I trotted out “Man” first, because, for some strange reason, that example occurred to me first. And in maintaining this particular order of introduction, I unconsciously repeated—and effectively reinforced or “re-reified”—an ancient order of male priority, a dogmatic fable as old as Adam. In attempting, that is, to conscientiously reflect on “Man” as a problem rather than a given, I unconsciously reproduced “Man” as the given rather than as an outdated problem. Now, upon recognizing my own complicity with the very order of systemic male privilege and priority that I was ostensibly writing against, I could have easily revised my writing, resituated the examples, let “Woman” come first, given Wittig the first or only words, etc. I could have neatly hidden the traces of my being unconsciously in cahoots with patriarchy, and no reader of my

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and things as they might otherwise be” and to act upon (or at least to write about) the desires opened up by that discernment. My fear is that we will move from a dehumanizing humanism—a “humanism [that] can constitute itself only by relegating some other subject or entity . . . to the mechanical status of an object or an accident,” as Achille Mbembe puts it in Necropolitics (2019: 163)—to an equally inhumane posthumanism without our ever having approximated (much less arrived at) “a fully human and humanly produced world” (Jameson 2010: 107). Speaking of pathologies: In Mythologies, Roland Barthes diagnoses what he calls “this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man” (1957/1985: 75).

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work would have been any the wiser.13 But since I should aspire to make my readers at least somewhat wiser—or, since theory’s purpose is to “negate reification,” and reification can be defined not only as commodified “thingification” but “as the removal of traces of production from the product” (Jameson 2010: 124)—I’ve chosen to let these infelicitous “traces of production” stand and to call your attention to them. I do so not to make myself momentarily look “bad” for having made the mistake and then “good” for having corrected it but rather to attempt further to illuminate what theory does, to describe theoretical activities while attempting in the process to do some theory, to attend to a contradiction and elucidate a problem. “Theory,” writes Culler, “is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices” (1997: 15). But theoretical writing is also always necessarily self-reflexive critique; it devotes considerable energy to thinking about (its own thinking about) thinking. Reflecting on meaning as problem rather than as naturalized given, theoretical writing is given or driven not only to reflect upon but also to interrogate, if not to torture, its own reflections—apparently to cause yet more problems. But why keep causing problems? Why this endless “problematization” of “meanings” that might just as well be taken for granted? Why not let just a few things go without saying? Why keep trying to make sense (or mincemeat) of the categories we use to make sense of things? Why not just keep using these categories if they have heretofore served us well? In regard to “literature and other discursive practices,” why all the “complicated fuss about things that really should be simply consumed” (Culler 2007: 251) or unproblematically enjoyed? Why not sign on with the “I love literature crowd” and simply relish reading for the sake of reading, literature for the sake of literature? Why not gratefully accept “the pleasure of the text” as gift, pure and simple? A short response to these questions would be that there is really no such thing as pure enjoyment, or simple pleasure, much less simple meaning, for any specifically human being. To say so is not bleakly to proclaim that there is absolutely no enjoyment, pleasure, value, or meaning ever to be had 13

In her entry on the term in the BHLCT , Laci Mattison tell us that “Patriarchy is a system of domination in many cultures that systematically benefits men through the disenfranchisement of women. Historically, patriarchy has been maintained through legal policies and social practices, including, for example, male control over household budgets, property ownership, and inheritance laws. The term is derived from the image of the patriarchal family, in which the patriarch (typically the father) is the ‘head of the household’ and the mother and children obey him. Patriarchy, however, is not limited to family life or the private sphere but rather is a pervasive, hierarchical system of oppression that touches all aspects of life, including social, cultural, political, economic, and religious” (2019: 612).

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(contrary to rumor, that is, theory is not a thoroughly anhedonic nihilism); rather, it is “simply” to say, with Jacques Derrida, that “things are very complicated” (1994: 110); it is “simply” to say, with Jean-Luc Nancy, that “the given always gives itself as something other than simply given” (2002: 52), that human experiences qua human are never pure or simple, if only because in reality a human being is “an animal at the mercy of language” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 525) and “language being what it is, we shall find nothing simple in it” (Saussure 1959: 122; Adventures 47). In other words, given this radical absence or lack of simplicity in language, given the irremediable loss of immediately natural life for any speaking being as such, the gift of the text can never be a simple present, for in all actuality “what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence” (Derrida 1967/1997: 159). Or, in the words of Marjorie Garber: Language is not a secondary but a primary constituent of human nature . . . Language is not transparent, though fantasies of its transparency, its merely denotative role, have always attracted and misled some of its users, both writers and readers. (2003/2008: 437–8)

So much, then, for any short sweet reply to the question of “simple” enjoyment; evidently, a more extensive response is needed. And indeed, this much more extensive response, which must account for why all of the preceding might actually be the case—which must explain why writing involves the disappearance of natural presence, why simplicity has gone forever missing from language, why speaking can be said to necessitate a loss of immediacy, why the transparency of language is an attractive but misleading fantasy, why the terms “human,” “being,” “meaning,” “nature,” “presence,” “language,” “text,” “writers,” “readers,” “enjoyment,” and so on, must all ceaselessly be called into complicated question, “dereifed into a complex set of human acts” (Jameson 2009: 47) rather than simply taken as natural givens—will take up the remainder of Ten Lessons in Theory.

III: Just being difficult/difficultly being just If language itself “is not transparent,” as Marjorie Garber stresses, theoretical writing is rather notoriously not so even more so. In his introduction to Critical Terms for Literary Study, Thomas McLaughlin provides some clear and compelling explanations for theory’s abrasive complexities and opacities. McLaughlin writes that “the very project of theory is unsettling. It brings assumptions into question. It creates more problems than it solves. And, to

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top it off, it does so in what is often a forbidding and arcane style.” But McLaughlin maintains that “theory isn’t difficult out of spite.” Rather, theoretical writing is always rough going because it has proceeded on the premise that language itself ought to be its focus of attention; that ordinary language is an embodiment of an extremely powerful and usually unquestioned system of values and beliefs; and that using ordinary language catches you up in that system. Any discourse that was to uncover and question that system had to find a language, a style, that broke from the constraints of common sense and ordinary language. Theory set out to produce texts that could not be processed successfully by the commonsensical assumptions that ordinary language puts into play. There are texts of theory that resist meaning so powerfully . . . that the very process of failing to comprehend the text is part of what it has to offer. (1995: 2)

For Culler, as we’ve seen, what theory does is reflect on meaning as a problem rather than a given. McLaughlin, however, puts Culler’s case more strongly, asserting that theoretical texts do not merely reflect on meaning but sometimes go so far as to “powerfully” resist it. And these texts don’t just resist some specific instance of meaning; rather, theoretical texts “resist meaning” altogether, resist meaning itself. They attempt to break free from those “constraints of common sense and ordinary language” that systematically regulate the ostensible given-ness of meaning, that work to make sure “our common perceptions” pretty much stay common. Theoretical texts attempt to liberate us as readers from these commonly normative constraints, since our very use of ordinary language is said to catch us up in this disciplinary system. Moreover, in their attempted break with conventionalized meaning, these texts endeavor to provoke in their readers a salutary failure to comprehend the very discourses that are offered up for comprehension. Promising a strange sort of freedom through cognitive failure, theoretical texts attempt to engage us in what Gayatri Spivak calls “moments of productive bafflement” (1999: 273; Adventures: 231). Should readers, then, take these baffling texts up on their offers and feel licensed to give up even trying to comprehend their meanings? By no means, for the unsettling “freedom through failure” of which I write above has nothing to do with the normalizing “freedom from analysis” to which I earlier alluded. Theory, that is, never gets us out of work, never frees us from the responsibility to read. Even in their most rebarbative moments of unreadability, theoretical texts mean not to repel readers but rather to encourage us to take the risk of getting caught up in the potentially productive

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process of unsuccessful processing. Theoretical writing offers us the opportunity to reflect not only on comprehensible meaning but on the very conventions of comprehension that make “meaning itself ” possible. Ceaselessly questioning what it means to mean, theory provocatively and perversely encourages us to challenge “the categories we use in making sense of things” (Culler 1997: 15), to inquire into the origin of these categories and of our places within them, to ask about their conditions of possibility as well as our own. Theory encourages such inquiry even if it involves the risk of comprehensive failure, the risk of “not getting it,” of losing certainty, losing “clarity,” losing the ability to “make sense” in the ways to which we’re normally accustomed, the ways in which we’ve in fact been formally trained. I repeat the word “encourages” here because I believe it requires something like courage to go against one’s training, to risk losing or disrupting one’s ability to “make sense of things” in one’s accustomed or inherited or “tribal” ways— or, going back to our discussion of Nietzsche at the end of the Preface, to risk our sense of “repose, security, and consistency” (1873/2006: 117; Adventures: 39). But what makes the risk worth taking is the possibility of discovering new and different ways of making sense of things—of the world, of the text, of oneself, of one’s life—in this “unprocessable” process. For once again: “There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (Foucault 1986: 7). Before going on with these reflections, however, I’d like to touch on two theses regarding the way theoretical writing disturbs our normal procedures of “making sense” and provokes us to “think differently,” to try to see “things as they are” otherwise. The first thesis—to my mind, a permanently and radically “de-reifying” one—is that “sense” must indeed always be made, must always be fashioned or fabricated, and by none other than our own all-toohuman hands. Making sense—like “making the present” in Michael Hardt’s (militantly made) sense—is nothing if not human labor; human reality is nothing if not a piece of work. To employ a sentence from Stuart Hall that will be put to much more strenuous labor in this book’s first lesson: “The world must be made to mean” (1998: 1050), which means that neither “sense” nor “meaning” ever grows on trees or falls from the sky, that there’s nothing “natural” or “supernatural” about these phenomena. To be sure, common sense and given meaning have often relied upon ideas of “nature” and/or some Deity or another to guarantee, legitimate, or otherwise prop up their own reproduction, to stabilize or “fix” themselves as steadily lucid signs. Be forewarned, however, that theoretical writing constitutively refuses “nature” and “God,” emphatically rejects both “biological determinism” and “divine will” as causal factors or explanatory solutions to any of the problems of

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human meaning. If it weren’t for the fact that theoretical writing also jettisons “Man”—erasing that little stick-figure “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1966/1973: 387)—we might say that theory is a form of secular humanism. Of course, theory is nothing if not secular; it is “firmly and rightly committed to renewing the necessary conviction . . . that thought only begins on the further side of religion” (Gibson 2006: 5); but theoretical writing is often just as resolutely “anti-humanist” as it is decidedly “antinaturalist” and deicidally “anti-theological” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147). Designating these antagonistic stances as such leads to my second thesis, which is that “theory” is most productively encountered as a “practice of creativity” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262) in itself, a genre of so-called “creative writing,” an interventional exercise in the art of the sentence. Theoretical writing, that is, warrants being read in the same “close” way that “defamiliarizingly” imaginative literature demands to be read. Indeed, the main premise of this book is that the risk we take in engaging with theoretical writing, the risk of losing the ability to “make sense of things” in our normalized, habituated ways, is intimately related to the risk we take in that “encounter with strangeness” (Bloom 1994: 3) which is (or can be) “the literary experience” itself. Theory, my friends, assumes “the world as text” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147). It engages with a world that must be made to mean as a problem to be interpreted rather than as a given that “just naturally” goes without saying. Theory is a de-reifying procedure of reading and writing that “refuses to fix meaning” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147) and which by virtue of that refusal affirms a world that can only ever be experienced as text, affirms “the very text of your existence” (Lacan 2008: 78) and mine, affirms a subjective existence that can only ever be lived “extimately,” inter-textually, as “interpretive experience” (Derrida 1988: 148). But these affirmations can never be purely “positive.” Theoretical affirmation always depends upon what Julian Murphet calls “the labor of intellectual negation” (cited in Menon 2015: 1, emphasis added). Theory, that is, enacts or actualizes itself by being anti-naturalizing, anti-humanist, antitheological, anti-essentialist, anti-normative, anti-metaphysical, and so on. But to the extent that “negativity can be positively exhilarating” to “a properly literary understanding” (Culler 2011: 228), this negative labor marks theory’s radical affinity with “creative writing,” with “literature.” Theoretical writing, perhaps like all actually creative writing, only ever agonistically affirms. It must negate or say “no” to a host of “givens” in order to say “yes” to what it takes to be the fundamental problem. But what, for theory, is the fundamental problem? McLaughlin has already told us by pointing out that theory’s enabling premise is “that language itself ought to be its focus of attention”; he further specifies that “the experience of theory . . . ought to engage the reader in a struggle over language and with

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language” (1995: 3). But we should hastily add that much more is at stake in this “struggle over language” than just some “ivory tower” tussle with terminology. For theoretical writers, this wordy conflict is intimately connected to worldly struggles involving relations of power. Theoretical writing, that is, conceives and understands the fundamental problem as the human powerstruggle over meaning, the conflictually “interpretive experience” of all our struggles with and over signs. This agon among animals at the mercy of language is always at the same time both a real power-struggle and a “matter of interpretation,” for power, as theoretical writing interprets it, “is both part of material, social reality, and also available to comprehension as a profoundly complex textual structure, operating differentially and discursively” (Wolfreys 2004: 197). In examining and challenging the workings of power, theoretical writers conflate these complex textual or discursive structures with more selfevidently “real world” forms of social, economic, political, and historical striving and strife, those forms of real human suffering, those matters of real life and death, that don’t “normally” seem to have much to do with sentences or textuality or semiotics or discourse—the really important matters that “people in the real world” typically don’t like being “reduced” to “mere words.”14 For theoretical writers, however, the fundamental problem is precisely that these down-to-earth agons never cease to have to do with words, have never been exterior to language, are “always already” irreducibly semiotic. For theoretical writers, the struggle over meaning—a problem as old as polis and papyrus and as new as Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” (1967/1997: 158)—is what constitutes any human subject, individual or collective, and all human reality as such. Theory, that is, interprets the whole of human reality as a “signifying structure” constituting itself through the social production, proliferation, and exchange of signs. But because this totally interpretive experience of socio-symbolic reality is seen in terms of “real-world” struggles over power, most theoretical writing situates a “political perspective” on

14

“Real-world people”—a category normally understood to exclude academics in general and “English majors” in particular—dislike having themselves “reduced” to mere words as well. Even students of literature, who supposedly “love language,” don’t always cotton to the thought that that’s the stuff all people in the real world are made of. But such radically “linguistic determinism” is pretty much the message of semiotics—the study of signs and signification—as it regards any and all selfhood or subjectivity or “personal identity” whatsoever. As for discourse, Wolfreys defines it as “the work of specific language practice: that is, language as it used by and within various constituencies (the law, medicine, the church, for example) for purposes to do with power relations between people” (2004: 65). He also writes that “human subjectivity and identity itself is produced out of various discursive formations as a result of the subject’s entry into language always already shot through and informed by figurations and encryptions of power, politics, historical, cultural and ideological remainders organized through particular relationships and networks” (2004: 66).

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language, literature, and culture as “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (Jameson 1981: 17). Although some postmodern and postcolonial theorists tend, as we’ll see, to abjure or suspect any “universal,” “totalizing,” or “absolute” claims about human reality, we might note that the preceding paragraph describes little else but universalizing absolutes. Indeed, the word “theory” itself might be considered a “nickname” for all the critical activities that begin to crank up at that moment when, as Derrida puts it, “language invaded the universal problematic and everything became discourse” (1966/1978: 280, my emphases). The “moment” or “event” that Derrida describes is sometimes called “the linguistic turn in the human sciences,” and we could probably do worse than consider the historical emergence of “theory” itself in terms of this all-encompassing “turn.” Jameson, for example, tags the linguistic turn as the very genesis of theory when he writes that “theory begins . . . at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.” Jameson thus describes theory’s inauguration as well as its continuation “as the coming to terms with materialist language” (2004: 403).15 The postcolonial theorist Rey Chow also commemorates the linguistic turn when she uses the term theory “to mark the paradigm shift . . . whereby the study of language, literature, and cultural forms becomes irrevocably obligated to attend to the semiotic operations involved in the production of meanings, meanings that can no longer be assumed to be natural.” Chow, like Jameson, defines theory as a coming to terms with materialist semiotics, as a way of paying “tenacious attention to the materiality of human signification” (2002/2007: 1910).16 15

16

For Jameson, “coming to terms with materialist language” involves the “attempt to dereify the language of thought” (2009: 9) and entails that “the traditional relationship between language and thought is to be reversed . . .: not language as an instrument or a vehicle for conceptuality, but, rather, the way in which the conditions and form of representation (speaking and writing) determine the concepts themselves, and constitute at one and the same time their conditions of possibility and also their limits, inflecting their shape and development” (2006: 365). I’ve already discussed some forms of materialism (historical, semiotic) in the Preface and directed you to further readings about other “newer” forms in a footnote there. In this footnote, I’ll say that one is well on one’s way to being “materialist” or “coming to terms with materialist language” in the sense that I find most productive when one attends to the production of meaning in a way that no longer assumes meaning or sense to have any “natural” or “supernatural” guarantee, when one begins to grasp the whole of human reality as an ongoing historical process of materialization or dynamic realization or actualization that originates in and depends upon nothing other than human productivity. Conceptualizing a world that must be made to mean, materialism “has to do with the humanization of that world and its de-naturalization, that is to say, with our recognition of that entire post-natural world [i.e., human reality itself] as the product of human praxis and production” (Jameson 2010: 108).

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Arguably, then, it is through pushing “the linguistic turn” to the extreme— through trying to grasp the most radical consequences of the idea that “everything” has become discourse, has always been discourse, will always be discourse—that theoretical writing both universalizes its political claims and politicizes its universal claims (even its paradoxically universal claims against “universalization”). Tenaciously attending to the materiality and historicity of all human signification whatsoever, assiduously connecting “all aspects of life and consciousness to the material conditions of existence” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 181), theoretical writing attempts to respond to the contradictions and conflicts embedded in the variously discursive ways in which the world must be made to mean. But responding responsibly to the ways our world means means more than just subjecting it to gnarly academic analysis. For Marx, as we’ve read, philosophers have only interpreted the world, while the point must be to change it. In the text called Specters of Marx, however, Derrida writes of “the dimension of performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing that it interprets” (1994: 51). For theoretical writers, then, to interpret the world really can mean to change it—that is, to substantially rewrite it—for the “real world” is “always already” nothing but actively and collectively performative interpretation. If theoretical interpretation involves transformative “thinking about thinking,” theoretical writing, to say it again, involves writing about “writing as the very possibility of change, the [discursive] space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646). With such subversive thoughts in mind, let’s return to the question of theory’s difficulty, to what we might call its guerilla warfare on “clarity.” McLaughlin, as we’ve read, asserts that theory “isn’t difficult out of spite,” but, to be quite honest, when considering all the possible motivating factors involved in theoretical militancy, I’m not so sure we should rule out “spite” altogether. Nietzsche no doubt had our number when, in the Genealogy of Morals, he linked our most rigorously “objective” intellectual procedures, not to mention some of our more “spiritual” aspirations, to extremely personal feelings of pique and ressentiment. And no doubt there are some really meanspirited theoretical writers out there who like nothing better than to shatter your poor common-sense perceptions for fun, simply because they can be shattered. But setting aside as much as I can my own not inconsiderable meanness of spirit, I would like to suggest that theory’s opacity, while perhaps partly rooted in all-too-human assholery, also involves an ethical obligation, a sense of political responsibility or social justice. I would like to suggest that what animates most theoretical writing is not a spiteful insistence on “just being difficult” but rather a strenuous commitment to difficultly being just.

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To explain what I’ve just said, I turn back to Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. I’ve already quoted this “difficult” duo’s text to the effect that “Intellect’s true concern is a negation of reification.” Now, on the same page in which they express this concern, Horkheimer and Adorno also write that “False clarity is only another name for myth” (1947/2002: xvii). By this claim the authors mean that we may never be more mystified, more benighted by our own mythologies, than during those still moments when everything seems perfectly obvious, completely unproblematical, when our “common sense” tells us that some premise or perception is clearly absolutely right and true. By the word “myth” the authors refer specifically to the sort of fearfully reactionary and religious/superstitious worldviews that “enlightenment” thinking (ostensibly rationalist modern philosophy) sought to escape, defeat, or crush (as per the slogan “écrasez l’infáme”—we must crush the infamy!—with which the arch-philosophe Voltaire reportedly signed his letters). In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno are concerned with what they call “enlightenment’s relapse into mythology” (xvi), the way purportedly fearless modern rationalism devolves into a fear-based “instrumental reason” as bloody and oppressive as anything practiced under any ancien regime. Other than mention that the authors see both the rise of European fascism and standardized post-Second World War American mass culture (particularly the Hollywood film) as linked expressions of this intellectual and moral disaster, we can’t rehearse their arguments about enlightenment’s mythological relapses here. We can note, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno consider “myth” the symptom par excellence of reified thinking. If critical intellect’s true concern is to negate reification, and if “clarity” can function as the calling card of reifying myth, then critical intellect should always be prepared to challenge “clarity” itself. Because in an utterly reified social order any instance of “clarity” stands a splendid chance of being a myrmidon of “false consciousness,” a promoter of “mass delusion,” the critical intellectual is always obliged to kick “clarity” in its transparent pants. In other words, in any culture in which reification reigns, the “duty of the critical intellectual” is to learn to suspect an ideological shell-game at work in the very insistence upon linguistic transparency, to smell something fishy whenever words and sentences appear “to mean” all too axiomatically, all too unproblematically, “all by themselves.” Obviously, then, since “clarity” itself can be the symptom of reification, it follows that one’s attempt to negate reification, to de-reify the language of thought, isn’t likely to be a super-easy lesson in clarity and grace. Indeed, one’s articulation is obligated to be strategically difficult, baffling, defamiliarizing, resistant to facile processing or immediate comprehension.

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Of course, for Horkheimer and Adorno, not every single instance of “clarity” in the discursive world is necessarily “false”; for these guys, clarity is mythological, and hence false, and hence potentially fascistic, only when it aids and abets reification. But we might understand clarity’s abetting function more clearly if we momentarily drop “reification,” Marxism’s preferred term for the undesirable “fixing” or coagulation of cognitive processes, and employ another word (namely, sedimentation) drawn from a different intellectual tradition (namely, phenomenology) instead. This terminological shift might give us some clarity about what’s at stake in both the formation and the attempted negation of clarity.17 Imagine, if you will, a firmly sedimented foundation at the bottom of some body of standing water. To call this foundation “sedimented” is to say that over a period of time a certain amount of particulate matter has “settled down” and become stably impacted therein. A direct result of this sedimentary process is that the water above the foundation remains relatively clear. Clearly, however, the water’s present transparency is an effect dependent upon the accomplished sedimentation, upon a previous “settling of matters.” In other words, “clarity” (figured here by the unclouded water) depends upon the sedimentation of complexity (figured here by these particulate “matters” which have been put out of sight, which seem to have just “naturally” gotten themselves “settled”). But if this sedimentary foundation were to be in some way unsettled or de-sedimented—if some trickster were to poke a stick into this soggy bottom and give it a vigorous stir—then all the gritty matters that had long been settled down would come swirling back up into play. And the necessary consequence of this agitation would be the water’s corresponding loss of clarity. Theory, if you hadn’t guessed, is the stick that stirs this dirty analogy, which is why we should stick with thinking of the very project of theory as unsettling: theoretical writing involves de-sedimenting or disturbingly

17

Phenomenology involves the analysis of “human consciousness as ‘lived experience’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 227) and is usually associated with “the canonical three H’s of German philosophy” (Rabaté 2002: 47): Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. The phenomenological term sedimentation appears in the later work of Husserl and, somewhat like “reification,” refers to a sort of spatial transformation of active perception into “settled” knowledge. David Carr writes that Husserl’s “geological metaphor suggests that which has sunk below the surface [of human consciousness as lived experience] but continues to support what is on the surface. Husserl availed himself of this metaphor in his later work precisely to elucidate what has the status of knowledge or belief rather than perception, but which recedes into a position comparable to a spatial horizon. It is that which figures in my awareness of the present, frames or sets it off without my having to think about it explicitly” (1987: 263).

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deconstructive thinking (about thinking) about writing (about writing).18 But contrary to the scatological allegations of those who despise theory and rejoice at the thought of its demise, the main impetus behind the theoretical “movement” in literary studies was never simply to dump a load of “fashionable nonsense” into the ordinarily clear and calm waters of thoughtful minds. Despite appearances, theory does not aspire to foul placidly apodictic streams of consciousness, but it very much desires to disturb the waters, to stir up matters seemingly long settled, all the better to “completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix), or “perforate the boundaries of [our] comfortable understanding” (Arya 2014: 26). Or, in somewhat ruder words, originally issuing from the lips of queer theorist Judith Halberstam, theoretical writing in its most unsettling deformations deeply aspires “to fuck shit up” (2006: 824), and so this writing sticks its abrasive questions and irritating keywords deep into the sedimented foundations and mythological fantasies that underpin reified ideational clarity—which means that we can take “anti-foundationalism” and stick it pretty high up on our expanding list of theory’s antagonistic stances. In the following pages, we’ll explore the dire consequences of what is no doubt theory’s most radically “anti-foundational” insight, emerging directly from the aforementioned “linguistic turn in the human sciences”: this would be the “structuralist” perception that signs “do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations” (Culler 1975: 5), that “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1972/1986: 118), that “no signification can be sustained except by reference to another signification” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 415), and so on.19 For now we’ll “simply” observe that, 18

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Although I defer describing deconstruction until later pages, I will here share David Richter’s story that Derrida at one point wanted to replace the word deconstruction with “de-sedimentation”—although “that word never caught on” (827). In fact, early in Of Grammatology, Derrida uses the words interchangeably: he writes of an “enlarged and radicalized” writing that “no longer issues from a logos” (that is, from any consciously rational center of intention, either human or divine), and he writes that “this writing inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the deconstruction, of all significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth” (1967/1997: 10). I should tell you that some in the “new materialist” crowd are unhappy with or sick and tired of the “linguistic turn in the human sciences” and the thoroughgoing emphasis on “representation” or “discourse” in theory in general. They want to dismiss or bypass “the linguistic turn” in order to “meet the universe halfway,” which is why I, in turn, tend dismissively to bypass them. Look, if you’re not all that taken with structuralist linguistics anymore, fine. But if you somehow can’t see that you can’t dis the linguistic turn without turning to language, if you can’t acknowledge that your point of enunciation is inescapably linguistic, discursive, representational, if you can’t grasp that “scientific representations are still representations,” as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson puts it on page 623 of her 2018 essay critiquing white feminist materialism (called “ ‘Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics”)—if, finally, “you can’t rock steady,” then, as the Black poet Prince puts it in his tune called “Housequake,” “shut up, already. Damn.”

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from a theoretical perspective, no single instance of linguistic or ideational “clarity” can ever just simply, transparently, meaningfully be; nor can “meaning” ever securely rest upon a naturally or supernaturally firm foundation, some reassuringly “real bedrock” of metaphysical truth. Rather, from a theoretical perspective, a perspective which always desires to bring about “a desedimentation of . . . encrusted determinations” (Smith 2002: xi), mythological clarity, ordinary language, plain common sense, given meaning, absolute truth, etc.—this whole crusty and determined gang—are all only the ideological effects of a naturalizing, essentializing, familiarizing, or normalizing suppression of other meanings, the repression of extraordinary signs. These assorted “betrayals of repressed human possibilities” (Derrida 2008: 105) work together as an active forgetting, a forced amnesia about alternative intelligibilities. While no meaning is sustained except by reference to another meaning, some meaning—namely, clearly given meaning— sustains itself through the erasure of competing interpretations. Such an erasure, such a removal of the traces of production from the product, is the very work of reification, of sedimentation, the underlying goal of which would be to obviate the very possibility that “things as they are” might be imagined otherwise.20 Theoretical writing, then, must always attempt to negate reification, must always work against the erasure of imaginative alterity. Through its restless de-sedimentations, theoretical writing attempts to help bring alternative intelligibilities into circulation, to help bring other ways of making sense, other ways of “making the present,” and other ways of unsilencing the past, into play. At its productively baffling best, theoretical writing “never stops coming back” to challenge, resist, or disturb all the sedimentary operations that are required to reproduce “ordinary understanding,” to stabilize “given meaning,” to reify all human reality, and to normalize a world thus insulated from discomfort, protected from interrogation, shielded from interpretation, contestation, and change. This “normalization” is what theory fights. This fight is what theory does. And what theory (still) does is why theory (still) lives.

20

I’ve repeated the phrase “things as they are” a number of times now without giving proper attribution, so here, at last, are two: In Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature, Simon Critchley writes that for Adorno “the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be” (1997: 22). Meanwhile, in the poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Wallace Stevens writes that “things as they are are changed on the blue guitar” (1937/1982: 165). I take “the blue guitar” to mean for Stevens the poetic imagination itself. But I also imagine that in some venues, performing the task of thinking, keeping open the very possibility of change, theoretical writing plays a pretty wicked blue guitar.

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Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in the Introduction: reification, essentialism, intersectionality, defamiliarization, humanism, patriarchy, semiotics, discourse, materialism/materiality, sedimentation/ de-sedimentation, phenomenology, deconstruction

Part One

Antiphysis: Five Lessons in Textual Anthropogenesis

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Lesson One

“The world must be made to mean” —or, in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality

I: Work with words So what in the world does it mean to say that “the world must be made to mean”? How does this sentence help us begin the hard work of “coming to terms with materialist language” (Jameson 2004: 403), of getting a handle on materialist semiotics? And why is this morsel of semiotic material an appropriate starting point for “in(tro)ducing the subject of human reality”— for introducing the idea that this “subject” must always be induced, as other processes, like labor or vomiting, must occasionally be induced? Like all properly “materialist” questions, these cannot be simply, briefly, or tidily answered, but we can learn a great deal about the most basic assumptions of theoretical writing by “coming to terms” with their terms. The sentence was written by the Jamaican-born Birmingham School cultural theorist Stuart Hall.1 To say that Hall’s sentence concisely expresses the most basic assumption of “materialist semiotics” is to locate it within the tradition of Marxist or “historical materialist” cultural studies. The initial clause of the sentence—the world must be made—is pretty much the

1

What Hall actually writes, in “The Rediscovery of Ideology,” is “The world has to be made to mean” (1998: 1050), but for a number of reasons, including the hard time I have resisting alliteration, I’ve changed “has to” to “must.” Birmingham School is short for the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, founded in 1964 at Birmingham University, UK. Hall was director of the Center from 1968 to 1979 (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 28–9). For more on Hall, see Jeremy Gilbert’s entry in the BHLCT , which starts like this: “Born into the Jamaican ‘brown middle-class,’ Stuart Hall (1932–2014) came to England in the 1950s, quickly immersing himself in the emerging intellectual milieu of the British ‘New Left.’ As the founding editor of the seminal ‘New Left Review,’ Hall’s early essays already expressed many of the interests that would come to characterize his later work: a concern to understand the changing class dynamics of advanced capitalist societies; a close attention to the emerging world of consumerism and mass-mediated commercial culture; a commitment to an anti-imperialist, democratic, and libertarian socialism” (2019: 507).

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foundational premise of historical materialism, while the final infinitive—to mean—is our semiotic kicker. Taken together, premise and kicker basically boil down to labor with language, or work with words, or, if you’ll forgive me, Marx with marks. What marks Marx as an “historical materialist” is his conviction that humans must always make or produce their “world,” their “history.” In other words, Marx concurs with what Edward Said calls Giambattista Vico’s “great observation that [people] make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made” (1979: 4–5). For Marx and other historical materialists, that is, “the world” is nothing but “the history of the world,” and that history is only ever “anthropogenetic,” only ever humanly fashioned, fabricated, or caused: humans and only humans are responsible for it.2 In The German Ideology, Marx sets his materialist analysis of anthropogenesis against philosophically idealist or mistily theological accounts of “the origin of the world.” He writes that human beings can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence . . . By producing their means of subsistence [people] are indirectly producing their actual material life. (1845/1978: 150)

For Marx, then, specifically human history begins, anti-naturally enough, when the earliest humans first distinguish themselves from immediately natural or merely animal life by actively producing the real material conditions of their existence, their human reality, their world. For Marx, humans and only humans “think, act and fashion [this] reality” (1844/1978: 54; Adventures: 16); only humans produce, actively and materially create, this world—which 2

Commenting on the link between Vico and Marx, Fredric Jameson notes that Marxism “stakes out what may be called a Viconian position, in the spirit of the verum factum of the Scienza Nuova [1725]; we can only understand what we have made, and therefore we are only in a position to claim knowledge of history [which is our work] but not of Nature itself, which is the work of God” (2009: 7); thus “Vico’s verum factum in effect sunders history from nature as an object of possible human knowledge” (2009: 217n21). But where Marx’s materialism surpasses Vico’s is less in the act of sundering history from nature as an object of human understanding and more in understanding human history itself as our permanent sundering of ourselves from nature, understanding history as the ongoing and productively human or “anthropogenetic” process of “antiphysis.” Marx further surpasses Vico in rejecting the idea that nature is “the work of God” and positing instead that “God” is the creative or imaginative work of “man”: for the militantly atheist Marx, that is, “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism,” and “the basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 15).

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is why some Marxists, such as Antonio Negri in Time for Revolution, speak of historical materialism as a “creative materialism” (2005: 166). Here of course the word “world” doesn’t mean the physical planet (crust, mantle, magma, molten core, etc.), which Marx doesn’t for a minute think that humans “created” (though he doesn’t believe that some almighty, otherworldly deity cooked it up, either); rather, by “world” an atheist historical materialist like Marx means the untranscendable horizon of human social existence in its historical totality, from the most rudimentary tribal forms in the “dark backward and abysm of time” to the most technologically developed and digitally fast-forwarded cyber-societies. Our specifically human history or “the world” begins for Marx not when some deity says “let there be light” but when “the first humans” begin working on the raw materiality of their immediately natural environment in order to transform it or cook it up into something starting to resemble specifically human or social existence— thereby becoming, anthropogenetically speaking, “the first humans.” In other words, probably because “living like animals” wasn’t working out all that well for them anyway, the proto-people who are our most distant ancestors gave up trying to live an “all-natural” life: they stopped seeking shelter in the nearest natural formation (the proverbial cave or some other hole in the ground) and starting building huts and hovels out of the available sticks and mud; they stopped being merely hunters and gatherers, as some animals can do no more than hunt and gather, stopped grubbing on whatever happened to be growing or grunting nearby, and started raising flora for harvest and fauna for slaughter. As these quite basic examples might suggest, the materialist gist here is that human reality or human history even at its most “primitive” level never “just naturally” (much less supernaturally) happens, never just grows on trees or falls from the sky; a certain amount of work or productive activity is required in order to get human history up and running, to begin the task of wrangling a realm of specifically human freedom from the merely natural realm of necessity.3 “Antiphysis,” then, as we rehearsed at length in the Preface, isn’t a bad name for this anthropogenetic activity, this totally human and—potentially, at

3

In This Life, Martin Hägglund distinguishes what he calls “natural freedom,” which nonhuman animals possess, from “spiritual freedom,” with which only human animals are endowed (though not by a “Creator”). Hägglund writes that “Natural freedom provides a freedom of self-movement, but only in the light of imperatives that are treated as given and ends that cannot be called into question by the agent itself. As distinct from natural freedom, spiritual freedom requires the ability to ask which imperatives to follow in the light of our ends [i.e., our desires, what we want to happen, what kind of world we want to live in], as well as the ability to call into question, challenge, and transform our ends themselves” (2020: 175).

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least—totally humanizing work on and “against nature.”4 For in an historical materialist account, there is no beneficently divine creator watching over us, and nature is completely indifferent to our survival, much less to our “cause” (freedom, autonomy, dignity, maybe one of these days equality, etc.). Nature, that is, doesn’t really give a damn whether or not we’re protected from its elements, doesn’t care if or, most importantly, how we live or die. If I live like a king or die like a dog, or die like a king and live like a dog, it’s all the same to nature.5 And the fact that nature is utterly indifferent to Operation Human Freedom, the fact that raw and immediate physical nature must be transformed, worked on, worked against, if this project of antiphysis is ever to get off the ground, constitutes the basic or “transhistorical” reason why “the world” must always “be made”—and always only by us. Because we the people first distinguish ourselves as people by anthropogenetically differentiating ourselves from other animals (and from our own animality) in the practical act of producing and reproducing our means and conditions of existence, human reality must always be distinguished from natural reality, from merely animal life.

4

5

I write here that human history as our ongoing work on and against nature is only potentially “totally humanizing” because so far history hasn’t exactly worked out this way for everybody: in other words, we haven’t yet reached what Jameson calls “the human age itself,” the utopian age of our totally mutual recognition of ourselves in a “fully human and humanly produced world” (2010: 107). The “world,” to be sure, is still only ever “humanly produced,” but for many the work itself is anything but “fully” humanizing. For many producers, that is, labor is still “alienated” in the four-fold sense Marx describes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. We will discuss Marx’s theory of alienated labor a bit more fully in Lesson Seven. For now let’s just say that from a Marxist perspective, “the human age itself ” can’t and won’t come about until all the gilded ages of global capitalism are superseded. “What cares these roarers for the name of king?”: When I first wrote that bit about nature’s indifference to either kingly or canine mortality, I was thinking of that moment in Shakespeare’s Tempest when the Boatswain, in the heated moment of the raging storm, dresses down all the meddlesome monarchists on board by posing the question that forms the title of this footnote. The nobles (clearly unaccustomed to having their “natural” authority questioned) strike back by calling the Boatswain a “blasphemous dog” and by promising the “whoreson cur” a good hanging (not exactly an idle threat at the time). It’s a complicated scene, because the “roarers” in question are not actually forces of nature but are caused by the stage-magic of Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, who as it happens cares quite a lot about aristocratic titles. And though the Boatswain is never taken to the gallows, his potentially radically democratic question—simultaneously dissing the “divine right of kings” and the only slightly more secular idea that monarchic social hierarchy is just in the (still divinely created) “natural order” of things—hangs in the air for the rest of the play, a theatrical work that de-naturalizes and de-legitimates monarchy by suggesting the utterly anthropogenetic theatricality of all historical modes of human authority.

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II: Post-oceanic feelings Or, as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might put it—in terms no less laboriously “materialist” than those of Marx—human reality must be distinguished from merely natural matters because each and every subject of this reality must be set apart from the Real, must separate or free itself from the Real’s oppressively immediate hic et nunc or “here and now.” Lacan describes “human reality” as a “montage” of the Imaginary (the register of images) and the Symbolic (the register of language). He distinguishes this imaginary-symbolic montage from another register, which he calls the Real. In Lacan’s account, the Real both precedes and exceeds human or “socio-symbolic reality,” precedes and exceeds any individual subject of this reality, any particular and distinctly human being. The Real precedes reality insofar as it relates to “the very young child’s experience of itself,” which, Lacan says, “develops on the basis of a situation that is experienced as undifferentiated” (1966c/2006: 91); Lacan characterizes this “precedent” Real as a perceptual state or experiential stew in which “things . . . at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (1966d/2006: 229). Because the inarticulate infant mired in this undifferentiated mess of the Real literally can’t “tell the difference” between its “experience of itself ” and everything else, it in effect experiences itself as “everything.” Now, I like to relate the “primary narcissism” of the Real, as the experiential “hic et nunc of the all,” to what Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents calls the infant’s “oceanic” feeling, “a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (1930/1989: 723)—a “feeling” that we all of course must one day lose. For eventually and inevitably each and every “very young child” must be pulled out of the “oceanic” Real and installed into a properly human reality, framed in the imaginary-symbolic montage, must face a time and “reach a point when a polymorphous lack of differentiation gives way to differences and taxonomies” (Roof 2016: 59)—must, in other words, become an individual human subject, an “I,” a parlêtre or “speaking being,” as Lacan puts it, “an animal at the mercy of language” (1966f/2006: 525). Thereafter, the Real is what exceeds human reality and “resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1975/1991: 66).6 6

Really?: It might be fair to say that while for Lacan the Real “resists symbolization absolutely,” symbolization in Lacan’s view never absolutely “cleanses” itself of the materiality of the Real. In the conclusion to his Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’, Tom Eyers writes: “As I’ve insisted throughout [this study], the Real is theoretically legible only if understood as fundamentally intricated with the other registers of psychic reality [i.e., the Imaginary and the Symbolic]. In particular, I’ve argued against any attempt to isolate the Real from Lacan’s development of a theory of language, an isolation that threatens to hypostatize the Real as an absolute ‘outside’. . . . [T]o render the Real as absolutely outside the Imaginary and the Symbolic is to condemn Lacan’s theory of the subject to the risk of linguistic idealism and to traduce the most sophisticated and compelling elements of his accounts of primary narcissism and the body” (2012: 161).

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We’ll be returning to Lacan, to the “post-oceanic feelings” of what Althusser calls “the former subject-to-be” (Adventures: 147), and to the Real’s resistance to language’s tender mercies, later in these lessons. Here let’s say that for Lacan human reality must be distinguished from the Real because in the Real there is nothing to distinguish the human from the merely natural/ animal “here and now.”7 While for Marx labor pries humans loose from nature, for Lacan language separates reality from the real. Taking Marx and Lacan together, historical materialist semiotics asserts the “labor of language” as the specifically and exclusively human mode of antiphysis that produces human reality as such. The world must be made, to be sure, but it must also be made to mean. Human reality is only ever the product of human work with words.8 But how do these laboriously linguistic matters relate to the idea that “the subject of human reality”—the individual human being—must be “induced”? Here we begin to approach a materialist assumption that “self ”-respecting human beings may find unpalatable: the assumption that, like “the world,” each and every one of us must also be “made to mean.” To paraphrase (and discursively un-“Man”) Lacan: we humans make meaning, but only because meaning makes us human.9 Anti-naturally enough, this quip means that 7

8

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Let’s also say a little more here about Lacan’s triptych: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. It’s true that Lacan distinguishes human reality, as imaginary/symbolic montage, from the Real. It’s also true that Lacan gives us a sort of developmental narrative in which the infant starts off in the undifferentiated Real, leaves that mess behind and enters “the imaginary order” via the so-called “mirror stage” (which we’ll be discussing quite thoroughly in a later lesson), and then supersedes the imaginary by entering “the symbolic order” of language. But Lacan doesn’t want to suggest that any distinction drawn between the Real and reality is absolute; nor does he want us to put all our psychoanalytically interpretive eggs in the developmentally narrative basket; rather, Lacan stresses the structural permanence of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic interconnections within human reality as such. In fact, he famously represents the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic with the diagram of the so-called Borromean knot: “a group of three rings that are linked together in such a way that if any one of them is severed, all three become separated” (Evans 1996: 18) and the whole “subject of human reality” falls apart. So while it’s accurate to say, as I have above, that “the Real” in Lacan’s sense precedes and exceeds human reality, it’s probably more accurate to say that the Real precedes, exceeds, and yet never ceases to invade human reality. This sense of invasion can produce a feeling of “extimacy” for the subject of human reality. As explained in the Preface, the word extimacy “neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis problematizes the opposition between the inside and the outside, between container and contained” (Evans 1996: 58); extimacy opens us up to the unsettling suspicion “that the innermost, intimate core of a person’s psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign ‘thing’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86). In imitation of the old “no shirt, no shoes, no service” signs, we might be tempted to say: no work, no words, no world. To quote the man directly: “Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229).

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none of us is ever actually naturally born human; rather, universally and transhistorically, we must all be turned into human beings through the antinatural labor of language. What does this mean? How does this work? How could this possibly be? Well, consider all the abilities or activities by which we tend to “distinguish” ourselves from animals. Make a list of everything we can do that a nonhuman animal, an ostrich or an aardvark, cannot. Seriously: make a list.10 Now consider whether you could perform any of the constitutively human tricks you listed immediately upon the moment of your birth, or even for several years thereafter. Sure, you may have first popped out with the innate potential to learn these operations eventually, to acquire these characteristics one fine day. But a moment’s reflection will inform you that you in fact had to be taught each and every single one of them because in the inert facticity of your natural neonativity you basically couldn’t do squat. In fact, from this rather unflattering perspective, our most “speciesspecific” characteristic as newborns is our utter inadequacy not only as humans but even as little animals. This lack of sufficient animality stems from what Lacan calls our species’ “specific prematurity at birth” (1966b/2006: 78), a messy matter we’ll consider more carefully in the next few lessons. For now, however, let’s see if we can cut through all the “ideological labor of cuteness” (Edelman 2004: 137) that is normally and normatively performed upon “the baby” and behold the human neonate as a “small animal conceived by a man 10

“Schoolteacher made his pupils sit and learn books”: Very often, at the outset of the classes I teach, I ask students to do what I’m instructing you to do here: list every trait or characteristic or ability they/you can think of that pretty clearly distinguishes a human from a non-human being. Then, once we’ve got an exhaustive list, I ask if any of us could actually do any of that stuff on the day we were born. Then I let our admittedly universal inability to do anything specifically human at birth or for months or years thereafter lead to the conclusion that none of us is ever “naturally born” human. And the “theoretical” point of the exercise, both in those classes and on these pages, is for us to learn how not to take our “humanicity” simply as a thing that goes without saying, to illuminate “the human” as a problem and not a “given”—which means that even though I am indeed a “schoolteacher,” my purpose in asking everyone to “make a list” here is different from what the character called Schoolteacher in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is up to. As the enslaved character Sethe recounts: “Schoolteacher made his pupils sit and learn books. . . . He’d talk and they’d write. Or he would read and they would write down what he said. . . . [One day he] was talking to his pupils and I heard him say ‘Which one are you doing?’ And one of the boys said, ‘Sethe.’ . . . Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back. He licked a forefinger a couple of times and turned a few pages. . . . [Then] I heard him say, ‘No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up.’ ” (1987/2004: 228). We’ll be revisiting Beloved—which as you’ll recall from reading the Preface is the novel that young Blake Murphy couldn’t “handle” and that his mother tried to get banned from her son’s high-school curriculum—in Lesson Seven.

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and a woman,” a little creature that will not just naturally become but must actually be made into “a small human child.”11 If we can swallow this queerly materialist description, then we might begin to digest the radical proposition that humanness itself, while a conceivably innate or hard-wired potential, is actually only ever a hard-scrabble acquisition, that we are each born as inadequate little animals, rough beasts that must be turned into little human children through laborious linguistic processes of socialization. Like the world that must always be made to mean, we ourselves must always be made to mean and must always continue to make meaning. But while being “made” here denotes being manufactured or fabricated, the word also suggests being compelled or forced, just as the word “must” implies an inexorable and hence vaguely sinister imperative. What are we to make of this more ominous meaning of the phrase “must be made”? Here it might help to know that Lacan refers to the human reality that we’re all gently or harshly forced into as the symbolic order. In Lacanese, the symbolic order is the underlying set of grammatical and syntactical structures that regulate the material production of meaning that is social reality itself. For Lacan, the symbolic order supports and pervades any actually existing social order. The symbolic order is the “grammatically correct” organization of cultural signs and symbols that gives us our “politically correct” position within the polis, within the prevailing social order (our properly gendered position within a legitimated exogamous marriage or kinship system, for example, or our abjectly racialized position in a legally segregated apartheid or slavery system, or our economically classed position in any and all phases of capitalism). To become a social subject of any sort, one must first assume the symbolic position of the grammatical subject: quite simply, one must first agree to designate oneself via the available first-person pronoun—to say “I” and really mean it.12 11

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I’m referring here again to what Louis Althusser calls that “extraordinary adventure [which] transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child . . . the forced ‘humanization’ of th[at] small human animal into a man or a woman”—words you’ll have already encountered in the footnote called “One is not born human” in the Preface. The point I stressed there and will stress again here is that “humanization” sounds like a good thing but is always to some degree another forced. “Its pronoun is it”: With this phrase “to say ‘I’ and really mean it,” I’m playing on the literal meanings of Freud’s German das Ich and das Es—“the I” and “the it”—which appear in Strachey’s English translation of Freud’s work as “the ego” and “the id.” Thus Freud’s famous motto Wo Es war, soll Ich werden—“where id was, there ego must be” (1933/2001: 80)—can be read more literally as “where it (das Es) was there I (das Ich) must come into being.” Thus “to say ‘I’ and really mean it” can mean 1) to say “I” and sincerely intend to represent oneself as a subject, a rational agent, a self-identical person, etc., but it can also mean 2) to say “I” but unconsciously refer to something else, something “other,” an “it,” an object, “an alien, foreign ‘thing’ ” (Johnston 2009: 86). This second and “darker” meaning points us to what Lacan calls “the truth of ‘I is an other,’ less

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But this seemingly casual agreement to “be oneself ” in words is actually “made” under a bit of psychic duress. For the symbolic order isn’t simply an ordered row of symbols, an organized concatenation of words. It’s also an order to symbolize, an officially issued directive to mean, to mean the way you’re supposed to mean—or else. To enter “the symbolic order,” to participate in human reality as one’s own personal “I,” one must first agree to follow “the symbolic order,” the order to symbolize, the relentless imperative to mean. Non-participation in “meaning,” exclusion from the privileges of the firstperson-pronoun “I,” would be the aforementioned “else”—and you really don’t want to end up there.13 Now, like everything else involving the production and reproduction of human reality, the symbolic order doesn’t just naturally or supernaturally happen, doesn’t grow on a tree or fall from the sky. So where does it come from? How is it maintained? Suppose I don’t really want to enter or follow it. Can I take or leave the symbolic order, as I please? Is it possible to refuse? Or does the symbolic order “make me” (as) an offer that I can’t refuse without somehow refusing myself and participation in human reality in the bargain? These questions take us into our next lesson, which explores the socializing mechanisms by which we are initially “made to mean,” first recruited or conscripted into human reality, first inducted into the “politics” of “meaning.”

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dazzling to the poet’s intuition than it is obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint” (1966c/2006: 96). We’ll have more to say about the dazzling truth of the symbolist poet Artur Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre” in Lesson Five, but here I’ll remind you about that “I’m a boy/it’s a girl” business we encountered in Judith Thurman’s intro to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as quoted back in the Preface. The point of the reminder is that the conscious/unconscious I/it or Ich/Es distinction can be gendered along binarized boy/girl lines even when both “belong” to the same individual’s psyche (even, that is, when not actually parsed out into separate but unequal bassinets). In other words, and as we’ll be seeing, the “it” is always extimately interior to the “I,” but “I” might not like “it” very much that this is “our” situation, and so, eaten up with a “deep-rooted fear of the other-in-the-self that we want to expel” (Arya 2014: 7), “I” might prefer instead to disavow or project or abject my inner “it-iness” onto others who, typically, are not gendered or raced or classed like “I” is. On the other hand, to really fuck around with the pronouns, a dazzling poet might discard das Ich altogether and globally embrace das Es, as does Julian Talamantez Brolaski, whose website tells us is “a two-spirit and transgender poet and musician of mixed Mescalero and Lipan Apache, Latin@, and European heritages. Its pronoun is it.” You really don’t want to end up there because, to quote Chris Coffman quoting Gayle Salamon, that move would put you back “ ‘squarely in the Real,’ leaving you ‘outside of language, outside of meaning, outside of the symbolic, outside of relation, outside of desire’—in a space of ‘radical abjection and death’ ” (Coffman 2017: 478).

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Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson One: Birmingham School, real/imaginary/symbolic, the symbolic order

Lesson Two

“Meaning is the polite word for pleasure” —or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read

I: Bungle in the jungle In our first lesson, concerning how “the world must be made to mean,” we encountered the rather rude proposal that none of us is born altogether human, that each of us comes into this world as an inadequate little animal that—not who, mind you, but, more precisely, that—must be turned into a small human child. We also encountered the unflattering suggestion that our entire species universally and transhistorically experiences a “specific prematurity at birth” (Lacan 1966b/2006:78). This bad timing is called upon to account for our woefully insufficient animality, for what Lacan calls the “organic inadequacy of [our] natural reality” at the experiential get-go, “a certain dehiscence at the very heart of [our] organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of [our] neonatal months” (1966b/2006: 77, 78). But what accounts for our so-called prematurity, our allegedly over-early launch out into this world that must be made to mean? How does it happen that we as a species don’t take as much time in uterine space as we apparently “should” and so seem “biologically determined” to endure a period of abject immobility and helpless dependency considerably longer than that of any other animal neonate? A conjectural explanation for our endemic “organic inadequacy” at birth is that premature birthing developed as a strategy of evolutionary adaptation: when our primate ancestors first assumed an upright gait, this postural shift precipitated a skeletal pelvic contraction in proto-human females such that heads of fully formed fetuses were suddenly too big to be born. But whatever its speculative pre-historical cause, the ongoing effect of our prematurity—and thus our dehiscent historicity—is that, unlike other animals, born simply as small versions of what they already organically are, we are not born human but have to be made that way. In other words, while any non-human animal that survives its neo-nativity will spontaneously grow to become an adult of its species, the infant of our 39

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species, congenitally inadequate to its own animality, requires careful assistance, orthopedic correction, extensive training, and prolonged cultivation if it is ever actually going to become a human being, a viable participant in any extra-uterine human reality. If the neonate for some reason never receives its “basic training,” if nobody ever “does any work” on it or with it, if nobody ever orders or induces it to mean, then this organism may somehow survive in the purely physiological or “animalistic” sense, but, bluntly stated, it won’t become “one of us.” It won’t, simply by virtue of growing larger, just naturally and spontaneously develop the characteristics that distinguish us—or, that we cultivate in order to distinguish ourselves—from non-human animals. In a way, this problem, the primordial discord of our species, is registered in the quirks of our vocabularies.1 Consider, for example, how fairly commonplace such English words as “humanization” and “dehumanization” (not to mention the practices they designate) can seem, while nonce words like “caninization” or “deporcinization” seem fairly absurd. And the reason these words sound stupid is pretty clear. You may or may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but you don’t exactly have to “caninize” a puppy in order for it to “become a dog” in the first place. And because the individual oinker is, arguably, completely identical to its own porcine life, the only way to completely “deporcinate” a pig, to turn it into “pork,” would be to kill it.2 1

2

In her entry on Primordial Discord in the BHLCT , Gina Masucci MacKenzie writes that “this term really derives more from Jacques Lacan than [from] Sigmund Freud, although Totem and Taboo (1913) tells a fable about the primordial discord of the primal horde and the primal father as the hallmark of the human species’ creation of civilization. One day, the previously humiliated and repressed sons band together to overpower the primal father of the horde, and after murdering him to gain their access to the females, they institute the law against incest and the law of obedience to the patriarchy, taking upon the tribe the necessity to honor the dead father’s word even more than when he lived” (2019: 640). We’ll be returning to what Lacan makes of Freud’s fable about the role that this “law against incest” plays in the “creation of civilization” (not to mention the development of language) later in these lessons. Here let’s note that, before they murdered the guy (and, in Freud’s telling, cut up and devoured his body), the sons and brothers of the “primal horde” were denied “access to the females” (i.e., their biological sisters and mothers) by virtue of the sheer physical/animal force of the “primal father”: the primordial Big Daddy physically “humiliated and repressed” his sons by physically separating them from the “objects” of their lusts. But after the murder (and the feast), the bros “humiliated and repressed” themselves, denied themselves sexual “access to the females” by virtue of the dead father’s law: in other words, they “internalized” as powerfully vocal imperative what they had “previously” ingested as portions of raw anatomy, which is why and how the dead father’s word became more important, more significant, more meaningful, than his merely physical life. And while unlike non-human animals (critters that can kill but can’t commit mass murder or succumb via suicide) we have proven ourselves particularly adept at actual genocide and self-slaughter, it is of course all too possible to “dehumanize” people and peoples while keeping at least some of them physically alive, to commit “cultural

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Humans, however, do have to be humanized, or socialized—worked on and put into words—in order to become certifiably (though perhaps never ever “fully”) human. It is sometimes said, though rarely anymore, that people should study “the humanities” so as to become “more fully human.” But as far as I know it has never been suggested that horses ought to study “the equininities” to become more fully equine, or that asses need to throw themselves into “the asininities” to become more completely asinine. But let’s sum up the idea that I’ve been braying about here, an idea that may come as a kick in the pants to any self-respecting common-sense adult but which, I would venture, most very young children intuitively understand— the idea that we “adulterated” human beings are actually only ever relatively humanized beings, never anything other than anthropomorphized animals in a world that must be made to mean. Now, when I suggest that children basically get this, that they actually understand humans to be socialized or anthropomorphized animals, what I mean is that children at a certain age might sense what’s really going on with them, what’s really happening to them, even if they couldn’t articulate the ordeal in such sophisticated language: children, that is, may unconsciously register the fact that their “animality,” such as it is, is being transformed by and into “sociality,” that their already quite limited “animal joy” is being further sacrificed to the sociosymbolic, that their cacophonous “animal being” is being exchanged for coherent, intelligible, and harmonious meaning. Of course, this exchange isn’t really the worst existential bargain in the world, for the child no doubt painfully perceives the extent of its own helpless dependency, the sheer inadequacy of its otherwise enjoyable animality. Ambivalently, then—grudgingly and gladly—the child, in order to become “a child,” a “who” instead of a what, accepts induction into “the human club” as a sort of consolation prize for not having been a particularly successful beast. But this child, I speculate, unconsciously (and, again, ambivalently) may very well register the cost of following the symbolic order. At some level—at some other frequency, so to speak—the child knows that something is being lost as well as gained in its mandatory morphing from a “what” to a “who,” from an “it” to an “I,” from “bad” little animal to “good” little boy or girl. genocide” against them or submit them to what Orlando Patterson calls “social death” (1982) without actually exterminating all “the brutes.” Indeed, we’ve been performing this nasty trick on each other, or each “other,” for pretty much all of “our” history. Some of “us” in North America have been particularly successful in mixing “cultural genocide” with the genuine article: see Hauser and Paz (2021) and Callimachi (2021). And the point of this bloody footnote is to reiterate the argument that “slavery and/or genocide” are always social and cultural phenomena, always arising from antiphysis—these “events” don’t just “naturally” happen, even if “nature” has often been trotted out to justify their perpetration.

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Evidence for this awareness on the child’s part might be found in the enduring popularity among schoolchildren of a certain species of animation. I refer to the pleasure that children take in watching animated cartoons that feature nothing but anthropomorphized animals—dogs, cats, mice, birds, bears that/who are capable of walking upright, can engage in relatively polite (if rather inane) conversation, etc. Very young spectators probably wouldn’t long enjoy watching a “realistic” cartoon canine that could only bark, growl, bite, eat from a bowl, crap on the sidewalk, etc.; they would be bored, dismayed, or possibly even frightened by animated adults who behaved just like their parents (and thus their own futures). But children do psychically invest in and gain representational pleasure from animatedly anthropomorphized animals. They find meaning in these figures simply because, as small animals that/who are in the process of being anthropomorphized themselves, they identify with these “funny” forms. These “silly” characters correspond profoundly to their own transitional state—no longer specifically animal, not yet certifiably human. Such cartoons compensate children for their acquiescence to the symbolic; they at least partially make good the little human animal’s huge animal loss. But let’s be clear about the “nature” of this loss. It of course involves a loss of nature, a loss of animal enjoyment, the disappearance of real pleasure. But it also involves a gain in and of meaning. But what, or how much, does this loss-as-gain actually amount to? How does this cost/benefit analysis open the question of meaning’s initiation as a subtraction of enjoyment, a sacrifice of pleasure, a renunciation of the real? Note that in the preceding I write that children “gain representational pleasure” from cartoons. Since cartoons are nothing but representations (i.e., they’re “not real”), the pleasure gained from them is clearly representational. But the phrase is tricky, implying a distinction between merely representational pleasure and some immediate nonrepresentational enjoyment of “the real thing.” And here’s where language rears its head, so to speak. For what is language if not a “mediating” system of representations in which words are called upon to re-present real things, to symbolize or signify the various matters of the real? But then again, what if language itself, in its entirety, were nothing but a massive and total substitution of itself for every really enjoyable thing, for any immediate enjoyment of or in the real? What if representational “meaning” turned out to be our very young child’s reward for having abjected or “cast out” real enjoyment? What if “meaning” were really only another word for “pleasure”—a single word for all the words that substitute themselves for pleasure and thereby effectively block our ever really having any ever again? Solemn adults who respect all meaning and suspect all pleasure—who both insist that life be Meaningful (with a great big honking “purpose-driven”

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capital M) and despise the thought of anyone’s enjoying being alive just for the hell of it—would likely be displeased by these questions (or rather, they would find them “meaningless”). But children, again, arguably understand the questions quite well—and perhaps even get a kick out of them. Indeed, in his book The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites, Adam Phillips goes so far as to suggest that “for the child, meaning [itself] is the polite word, the sophisticated word, for pleasure” (1999: 11). What does Phillips mean by this impolite suggestion? For Phillips, I think, the word “pleasure” pertains to what Freud calls the pleasure principle, a primary type of psychical functioning that Freud contrasts with the reality principle. As we’ll see in the following elaboration of these two principles, their negotiation is the crux of what I’ve called above the very young child’s “existential bargain”—the initial anthropogenetic exchange of “bad” young animal being for “good” old human meaning. In other words, the negotiation between the pleasure and reality principles is the very condition of possibility for that little animal’s being brought “into the fold” of human historicity, becoming a subject of human reality. Now, you may be surprised to learn that by “pleasure” Freud does not mean “stimulation” of any sort (sexual, emotional, neurological, etc.) but rather just the opposite: by “pleasure” Freud means the reduction of excess stimulation, the subtraction of unpleasurable tension. By “pleasure principle,” then, Freud designates a process of mental functioning that demands and depends upon unpleasure’s immediate reduction. The basic “goal” of the pleasure principle is to retreat from unpleasurable tension and return to a psychic equilibrium or quiescence, an ideally tensionless homeostasis. Whenever it loses homeostasis, whenever it experiences unpleasurable tension in any form—abject hunger, shit-filled diapers, fear of the dark or of strangers or of being all alone—the helpless infant wants to get its “pleasure” back, wants the tension to go away, wants its ass to be wiped, wants its homeostasis restored, immediately. But in reality there will always be some discrepancy between the infant’s immediate demand and two interrelated and mediating factors (factors which “mediate” in that they “come between” infantile demand and its fulfillment): one significant factor is the time it actually takes for homeostasis to be satisfactorily restored (if ever it is); the other significant factor is the form in which the satisfaction actually materializes (if ever it does, and the object eventually obtained may very well differ in form from the object irritably anticipated). Reality, then, constitutively involves the “factoring in” of significantly temporal delay and significantly formal alteration (so much so that, as we’ll see, temporal delay and formal alteration become the twin bases of “significance” itself). The discrepancy between immediate, formally self-identical gratification and satisfaction

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temporally delayed and/or formally altered is pretty much the difference between pleasure and reality. And every “little animal” must deal with this difference in order to factor itself into human reality, to become a small human child, a “good” or polite little girl or boy. Now, the infantile psyche—ragingly impolite (and arguably ungendered) at this juncture—is completely under the “inhuman” dominance of the pleasure principle.3 Whatever it wants, whenever it wants it, its infantile majesty wants 3

Excursus on “gender” and the “post-oceanic feelings” of the “former subject-to-be”: What does it mean to link, as I have above, the infantile, the impolite, the ungendered, and the inhuman? And what does it mean to mix all those matters up with Lacan’s thesis that “the very young child’s experience of itself . . . develops on the basis of a situation that is experienced as undifferentiated” (1966c/2006: 91), an experience in which “things . . . at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (1966d/2006: 229), an experience which I relate to Lacan’s concept of the Real and indifferently dump into Freud’s notion of the “oceanic feeling”? We might start to answer these questions by turning to Judith Butler’s well-known line that “Discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, we regularly punish those who fail to do their gender right” (Adventures: 244)—a crucial observation, but one with several contrastable political consequences. On the one hand, if, as I’m arguing here, all of us “little animals” have to be “humanized” within the culture that is contemporary to us, and if “discrete” gendering along strict boy/girl lines remains a large part of that humanization process, then any act of gender “indiscretion” or sexual indifferentiation on the part of those who opt for “resistance to dictated form” (Keegan 2018: 3), who aren’t at all interested in doing “their gender right,” may be perceived by some as a justly (and lethally) punishable violation of the “God-given” limits of “the human,” which is one of the reasons trans people (particularly trans women of color) are so frequently murder targets within “our” contemporary culture. On the other hand, if gender differentiation has been experienced as a vital part of one’s humanization within the domestic sphere of a specific culture whose values one wants to preserve or uphold, then forced or imposed gender indifferentiation may be experienced as dehumanizing, as a type of “cultural genocide” or “social death.” And the point of this contrast is that white theoretical writers like yours truly need to remember history when thinking about gender in largely psychoanalytic terms—“universal” terms like, say, Freud’s “oceanic feeling,” to which I keep returning here. We need to distinguish what I’ve called the “post-oceanic feelings” of the “former subject-to-be” from the feelings of those “dehumanized, ungendered, and defaced” others who were carried as the generic “cargo of slave vessels” across a specific ocean called the Atlantic. We need to remember Hortense Spillers remembering “those African persons in the ‘Middle Passage’ [who] were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity: removed from the indigenous land and culture, and not yet ‘American’ either, these captive persons, without names their captors would recognize, were in movement across the Atlantic, but they were also nowhere at all” (1987: 72). We’ll be coming back to these and other contrasting takes on the undifferentiated “oceanic feeling” in another lengthy excursus in Lesson Four. Here, though, let’s briefly focus back on the difference between gender neutrality freely chosen and gender neutrality barbarically enforced. I recently attended a faculty meeting at my institution here in Atlanta where I was updated on efforts by campus progressives to have some of the women’s restrooms in our building converted to “gender neutral” facilities. I of course support these efforts. But even though I didn’t bring it up at the faculty meeting, I do think it’s worth recalling that there were once “gender neutral” pissoirs and “shit-holes” in Atlanta and throughout the Jim Crow

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exactly what it wants and it wants that now. It “knows no reason” to endure waiting for pleasure’s homeostatic restoration; it “knows no reason” to accept any substitute gratification whatsoever. Too bad for this completely unreasonable infant that it’s also utterly powerless, helpless and dependent, a miniscule tyrant incapable of actually doing anything to remedy its “wanting” situation. Under the pleasure principle’s dominance, then, the infant “having a bad time” attempts to reduce anguished temporality in the most “immediate” way possible—by mentally summoning (i.e., fantasizing, hallucinating) the missing object (the mother’s breast, for example). But since this instant “fantasy image” fails to satisfy, provides merely representational pleasure but never “the real thing,” the infant who wants someday to be more and other than an infant must eventually give itself over to the mediations of the reality principle. The infant, that is, must actively substitute a real demand for the merely imagined delight, must actually cry out for the missing object, which in reality may only eventually appear, may show up in a disappointingly diminished form (pacifier instead of nipple), or may never materialize again in any form whatsoever—the toughest tit of all, so to speak. The psychoanalytic gist here is that reality necessarily impels the infant’s acquiescence to waiting and substitution, to temporality and exchange. To the infant’s fantasmatic demand for the real thing, right here, right now, reality or “the adult world” comes back with a prohibitive or retarding counter-offer: reality “responds,” so to speak, with a rather tragicomical “promise of happiness,” with a “not that, not here, not now, not yet; something else, somewhere else, some other time, maybe—we’ll just have to wait and see.” Given adult-world’s promisingly negative response, the infant, completely dependent upon adult-world, has little choice but to renounce the fantasy of immediate enjoyment and accept the adulterated, delayed, partial, altered, substitutive gratifications that reality offers—or rather, that human reality essentially is.4

4

American South: they were designated as “Colored.” As Elizabeth Abel points out in her study “Bathroom Doors and Drinking Fountains: Jim Crow’s Racial Symbolic,” “if ‘colored’ bathrooms were sometimes ungendered, ‘white’ ones were always gender differentiated” (1999: 452). We’ll be going (back) to the bathroom(s) again in Lesson Eight. In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud writes that “whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for [us] than to give up a pleasure which [we have] once experienced. Actually, we never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate” (1907/1989: 437–8). In Civilization and its Discontents, however, Freud describes perhaps the most “universal” form this “existential bargain” takes when he writes that “Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities for happiness for a portion of security” (1930/1989: 752).

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Outside of accepting reality’s counter-offer—a frustratingly vague “promise of happiness” in place of the real thing—the infant’s only other “option” would be to remain a kicking and screaming infant for all time. The word “infant” of course means “without speech,” so, psychically speaking, remaining an infant (even while physically outgrowing the nursery) would mean “going without” speech. But without speech one isn’t likely to get very far with the grown-ups. For the reality principle, whose interests the adults represent, offers its promising gifts mainly in the form of speech, or even as the very structure of language itself. For language, like the reality principle— or perhaps as the reality principle—always involves temporal delay, formal alteration, partiality, substitution, displacement, and exchange. While real, natural, animal, or infantile experience is always immediate, reveling in the here and now, human reality, revelatory linguistic meaning, must always unfold in time (for “meaning” is never instantly “revealed” through parting clouds but actually only ever appears in sentences, and even the shortest sentence imaginable isn’t exactly instantaneous, while some— like those I write, as you may have noticed—seem to drag on forever). Language, linguistic meaning, always takes time, always takes us out of the present, always tears us away from the here and the now. As Lacan writes, language, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by deploying its dimension in some sense before it. As is seen at the level of the sentence when the latter is interrupted before the significant term: “I’ll never . . .,” “The fact remains . . .,” “Still perhaps . . .” Such sentences nevertheless make sense, and that sense is all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it (1966e/2006: 419).

Always making us “wait for it” (whatever “it” may be), language oppressively substitutes its “promise of happiness” for happiness itself. And language, with its negatively promissory or “differential” structure, always “exists prior to each subject’s entrance into it at a certain moment in his psychic development” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 413). Initially, upon entry into language, “each subject” is saddled with the responsibility of substituting words for withdrawn gratifications, for prohibited pleasures, for unsettled homeostases, for lost or missing things; subsequently, as reality’s “life-sentence” goes on, “each subject” must ride out the relentless substitution of words for other words, must follow the potentially infinite combination of words with other words. For each and every subject of human reality must be made to mean: that’s the symbolic order.

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II: l’être pour la lettre The negotiation between pleasure and reality is the symbolically ordered sacrifice of insufficiently animal being for properly human meaning. Lacan calls this animality-overcoming exchange l’être pour la lettre, by which phrase he designates the anthropogenetic act of swapping “being” (l’être) for “the letter” (la lettre). But call it whatever we please, call “it” by some name we must, for barring this mandatory change-up, our infant can never become a “meaningfully” human being. If the infant “chooses” against reality, goes on hunger strike, opting for its internally conjured image of the mother’s breast to the point of refusing the externally real thing, it could starve to death, lose its very animal life. If it refuses to trade its demand for immediate gratification for its desire for the other’s recognition, for the promise of a more significant, meaningful, important pleasure in the future, then our infant will refuse (to be made) to mean, refuse to work (or be worked on) with words. It will never obey or accede to the symbolic order, and “it” could thus lose its opportunity to “fully” participate in properly human life, to be a subject of human reality, an “I.” Now, Adam Phillips suggests that the child sacrifices pleasure to meaning not to “be a subject of human reality” but rather, and seemingly more simply, in order to be “polite.” The word “polite” does seem relatively simple, but it gets kind of complicated if we play a bit rough with its etymology. For being “polite” involves more than simply refraining from talking with one’s mouth full, or interrupting the grown-ups, or loudly farting in their general direction. Of course, polite “participation in human reality” does largely entail learning how and when to keep our asses covered and our pie-holes shut, learning how to be well-behaved in the polis. But such excellent comportment doesn’t just naturally happen, doesn’t just develop spontaneously; rather, it results from our being rather relentlessly policed. The most profoundly political meaning of “meaning is the polite word for pleasure” is that proper “meaning” always means being subjected to some sort of surveillance, some sort of “police” investigation. “Meaning” means being disciplined or corrected, not simply by Miss Manners or some “prescriptive grammarian” but by the symbolic order itself—the “Big Other,” as Lacan also ominously calls it. “Meaning” means pleasure’s being put under the Big Other’s “panoptical” watch; it is the political consequence of having subjected oneself and one’s pleasures to the normative policies and prohibitions of the socio-symbolic order. If these policies are properly enforced, then the polite or “politicized” child will have taken its rudely animal being and “turned it in”—given it up, informed upon it, betrayed it to the authorities, had it arrested—in exchange

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for literally human meaning. The “wild child” becomes a wise child when it trades up the animalistic demand for immediate gratification for the anthropogenetic desire for the other’s recognition. To illustrate how this trade might work, I turn back to that most rudimentary of examples: the baby at the mother’s breast. At the animal level, the infant needs this overflowing “object” not merely for “ideal” psychical homeostasis or ideational “security, consistency, and repose” but for real physical survival. At this level of sheer physiological need, there’s no real difference between the proto-human animal and any other udderly feeding beast: we all must nurse or die. What sets our “beast in the nursery” apart is that it demands something more and other from any udder than mere mammalian sustenance. The “wannabe human” infant demands to be given the breast-giver’s gift not only as an indispensable “life-line” but also as an excessive sign—a signifier of (what else but) love. In other words, just as Marx’s very early workers “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence” (1845/1978: 150), so the very young child distinguishes itself (and its “self ”) from its own suckling animality as soon as it accomplishes the work of letting the sign-value that attaches to the appearance of the breast exceed the merely animal “life-value” that flows directly from it; in other words, the very young child distinguishes itself from itself when it first begins to learn how to read. For what else but reading would we call an activity in which a sign of life somehow becomes more important than immediate life itself, which thereafter seems strangely to lose significance? No non-human animal can ever be taught to “read” in this sense or to this extent; no non-human animal can ever allow a mere sign, a mere look of love or recognition, to become more important, more significant, than its own animal life; no non-human animal can ever consider losing life for love. A manatee couldn’t manage it. But our little animal turns human not by literally losing life but by symbolically exchanging l’être pour la lettre, not by really dying but by metaphorically sacrificing the “inner animal” that is unwilling to sacrifice itself, unwilling to metaphorize, that recalcitrant beast that needs to be fed and demands to be pleased but can’t quite bring itself to “come to terms,” can’t quite agree to defer pleasure or accept substitute gratification, the animal that can’t stand being in a state of sustained desire because it is incapable of ever “dying to be loved”—the animal, in other words, that can’t be made to mean. The fledgling human sacrifices or renounces or distances itself from its bad animal being in a bid to be recognized, to be meaningfully loved or belovedly “read.” For to be read/recognized as being meaningful is to be loved, wanted, approved, applauded, to be the deserving recipient of some (typically parental) hymn of praise. Reading/recognizing as desiring to be read/

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recognized means desiring not only to “find meaning” in the other (rather than just demand pleasure from the other); it means desiring to be found meaningful (rather than merely animal) by the other, to rise in the other’s esteem, to become not a “what” but a recognizably human “who” who would “literally” rather die than go without meaning, would rather die than remain an animal “it,” a mere thing, in the estimation of others. The anthropogenetic desire for recognition trumps merely animal need and merely infantile demand whenever the very young child recognizes that it is significantly more pleasurable to have certain others be pleased with it than it is for “it” to have whatever pleasure it wants whenever it wants it.5 The “beast in the nursery” begins to learn to read when it starts allowing the metaphorical incept of desired signs to become more important than the material intake of needed sustenance, when it starts perceiving substitutive “signs of life” and reality’s “promise of happiness” as being somehow “better” than immediate life itself—“even better than the real thing.” When the real thing in question is the breast, what the infant must learn “to read” is not that real pound of flesh, much less its milky issue, but rather the telling expression that “overflows,” so to speak, from the breast-giver’s visage. When the needy infant demanding the udder accepts in its stead something other, a disappointingly diminished substitute—the cold dry plastic pacifier instead of the warm and softly seeping thing—it accepts this diminution only because a surplus of meaning provides symbolic compensation, “makes good” the loss of real enjoyment qua enjoyment in the Real. The mother’s “completely” approving facial expression, her milky “look of love,” along with any “unconditionally” soothing sounds she might manage to make, all work to compensate the infant, to “make up for” the difference in pleasure-yield between pacifier and breast. These “significant” sights and sounds partially “paper over” the discrepancy between enjoyment anticipated and enjoyment obtained. But if the infant does feel fairly compensated, it does so only because it senses what it damned well better get used to sensing—to wit: that it is “better” to “take in” these rewarding sights and sounds of approval than it is to obtain immediate gratification. At the end of the day, reality’s primary lesson about our “primal discord” is still Freud’s famous motto Wo Es war, soll Ich werden: “where id was, there ego must be” (1933/2001: 80), or, more literally, where an “it” was an “I” must come into being. Reality’s lesson, in other words, is that it

5

I allude here to the distinctions Lacan makes among need, demand, and desire, which roughly and respectively correspond to his three “registers” of psychic life: the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. We will return to the “knotted” relations among these two trios in our fourth lesson.

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will have been much more significant for me, das Ich, to obtain recognition (for having sucked it up and been “polite”) than it would have been for it, das Es, to have gotten exactly what it wanted exactly when it wanted it (back in the pre-historical miasma of the Real, the merely natural/animal hic et nunc of the all). If the inadequately animal infant doesn’t learn this “history lesson,” if it doesn’t on a very basic level grasp “the virtual character of the symbolic order [as] the very condition of [its] human historicity” (Žižek 1999/2002: 241), if it doesn’t figure out the terms of this existential bargain—if it clings to its pure pleasure principle in the Real and doesn’t allow itself to be worked over by virtual reality, if it simply continues to cry like a baby until it gets what it wants, refuses any substitutive pacification and never learns to give a big happy damn what any significantly “big other” thinks of it—then this “beast” isn’t going to get very far in the polis. It probably won’t make it out of the nursery.

III: Happier endings Adulterated reality, then, must supersede pure pleasure if “das Ich” is ever to displace “das Es,” if anything resembling anthropogenesis is ever to occur. But reality can’t simply eradicate pleasure altogether; rather, reality modifies, redirects, transforms pleasure. Reality can’t “just say no” to any and all enjoyment. Reality “says no” to immediate and self-identical gratification, to be sure, but because no animal responds well to unmitigated negativity, the reality principle must always hold out the future promise of greater, more important, more significant gratification. The paradoxical crux of the matter, however, is that, throughout their negotiated conflict, the pleasure and reality principles still share the same overriding goal—the reduction of unpleasurable tension, the restoration of homeostasis. And since the goal does remain the same, pleasure still pretty much rules the roost, despite reality’s steady encroachments on its terrain. What must fundamentally change in the transition from pure pleasure to accomplished reality is the question of what actually constitutes the source or cause of the unpleasurable tension that demands to be reduced. Back in the day of the pure pleasure principle, what caused unpleasurable tension was whatever forced us “to wait for it”; in our quest to have our homeostasis restored a.s.a.p., we psychically withdrew like the heads of frightened turtles from whatever threatened to make us wait—that is to say, whatever threatened to make us mean. In the accomplished reality principle, however, unpleasure involves whatever disturbs the reassuring stability of meaning, whatever threatens the formally established coherence—the security, consistency, and

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repose—of das Ich. The stray memory of non-meaning (the “purposeless” animal enjoyment of inarticulate babble); the emergence of bad meanings (impolite or “perverse” gratifications that “I” might feel sick even thinking about); the appearance of strange meanings (unfamiliar articulations that disturb my normal understanding, anxiogenic “foreign elements” that “terrorize” my psychic equilibrium): all these “bad” things become the unpleasurable tensions that “I” have to deal with—that is, repress—if meaningful homeostasis (the “homeland security” of my own private Idaho) is to be maintained. In the pleasure principle, it is the very thought of repression, the thought of my having to renounce a satisfaction, of my not getting what I want, that precipitates unpleasure; in the reality principle, on the other hand, it is the thought of the return of the repressed, of getting more than I bargained for, that does the trick. As Freud writes in the essay called “Repression,” a specific satisfaction might be “pleasurable in itself ” (i.e., in the pure pleasure principle) but “irreconcilable with other claims and intentions” (e.g., those of the reality principle). Thus the same thought can “cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another” (1915/1989: 569). Psychoanalysis, which studies psychic conflict, which explores the ways the same thought can generate antithetical feelings, has thus been called “the science of ambivalence.”6 But speaking of ambivalence, and of tricks, the one that my “I” is about to play on yours really isn’t very nice. For I can imagine that your “I” could without very much difficulty imagine itself as an infant sucking with placid satisfaction at its mother’s breast. Your “I” might even be able to imagine that infant back then being seriously displeased to have this breast suddenly yanked away. You as an adult “I” can probably imagine fairly easily that you as an infant “it” would want to banish immediately the very thought of the nipple’s disappearance. OK, so far so “good.” Now let’s see if you can imagine yourself at your present age sucking away at the wet and erect nipple of your own mother’s breast (not just any old nipple, mind you, but specifically, unimaginably, unspeakably, your own mother’s). I imagine, I would even heavily bet, that your “I” can bring that image to mind only with extreme difficulty, if at all, that the very idea provokes feelings of queasy disgust, unbearable shame, painful embarrassment, horrible incestuous weirdness, homophobic revulsion (particularly if you’re a “good girl”), considerable anger at yours truly for even trying to stick this hideous thought into your head, etc.—in other words, massive psychical unpleasure. You must want to get this sick notion out of your noggin as quickly as possible. But while you’re 6

I have to apologize for the fact that I can neither remember nor discover who coined this phrase: I’m beginning to think that I dreamt it.

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busy trying to restore your disrupted homeostasis, let’s at least note what’s illustrative here: to wit, back when you were a little “it,” completely under the dominance of the pleasure principle, it was the thought of the object’s disappearance that you wanted immediately to get rid of; now that you’re a great big “I,” long under the sway of the reality principle, it’s the unwelcome thought of the object’s return that you want to beat back, exclude, expel, repress, tout suite, for “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from consciousness” (Freud 1915/1989: 569–70). In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the term unconscious marks the “extimate” space of “otherness within” each of us, the traumatic thing or “unbearable truth” (Žižek 2006: 3) within each subject’s psyche from which normally constituted consciousness tries to keep its distance.7 So when I write that anthropogenesis depends upon repression, that anthropogenesis begins to kick in when impolite animal being is “sacrificed” to properly human meaning, I don’t mean to suggest that the sacrificial beast just vanishes into thin air, flies or slithers or waddles off to die. For “to be sacrificed” doesn’t necessarily mean “to be killed”; sacrificing an object can involve making it “sacred” by setting it apart, excluding it from the mundane, the everyday, the familiar, the easily accessed, the readily known. The strangely animal “it” of the pure pleasure principle is not terminated but repressed, distanced from normal everyday consciousness, from the standard operating procedures of “common sense.” Upon repression, it—the it, das Es—is relegated to the unconscious, where it doesn’t expire but rather remains a lively but covert participant in the psychic life of the I, of das Ich, sometimes coming back to bite my polite or “politicized” ego in the ass. As this rather rude turn of phrase might suggest, its most vital activities are fundamentally incompatible with normal, conscious, proper meaning and polite manners, homeostatic good housekeeping, all the rules and regulations of fine upstanding citizenship, freedom, dignity, self-respect, impeccably clear writing, and so on. The fundamental psychoanalytic thesis about anthropogenesis is that none of us ever neatly exchanges l’être pour la lettre, pleasure for reality, wild being for civilized meaning, our pitiful portions of real happiness for the Big Other’s tenuous portions of security. There’s always

7

In How to Read Lacan, Žižek writes: “The unconscious is not the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks out. Therein lies Lacan’s version of Freud’s motto Wo es war, soll ich werden (Where it was, I am to become): not ‘The ego should conquer the id’, the site of unconscious drives, but ‘I should dare to approach the site of my truth.’ What awaits me ‘there’ is not a deep Truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with” (2006: 2–3).

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for each of us an “unbearable truth,” an ego-traumatizing remnant or leftover, unconscious but still unceasingly productive, the impolite if not unspeakable “stuff ” that our darkest dreams of light are made of. Freud of course called dreams the “royal road” to the unconscious. But for any theoretical writing that is informed by psychoanalysis, all the lost highways on the map of human reality lead to and from that bizarre location as well. For the main gist of psychoanalytic theory is that the unconscious plays its part not only in the production of baffling dreams, neurotic symptoms, and embarrassing slips of the tongue; it determines and undermines the very production of meaning itself, all the work with words that makes the world that must be made to mean. Unconscious desire haunts all the forms of symbolic compensation or substitute gratification that we can imagine, or that have been pre-imagined or prefabricated for us, in this world or “the next.” Cartoons and other forms of child’s play can of course “count” as such imaginary or fabricated compensation. But then so can all the really important grown-up stuff as well: literature, art, cinema, culture, politics, philosophy, science, religion, not to mention theory itself—in short, pretty much everything of which it pleases us to say that it all “has to mean something,” that it must be meaning and not just pleasure. I mean, what are we—animals?

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Two: primordial discord, pleasure and reality principles, the unconscious

Lesson Three

“Language is by nature fictional” —or, why the word for moonlight can never be moonlight

I: Down to earth Thus far in our introduction to theoretical writing we’ve seen some fairly large claims being made for language. We’ve been instructed that theoretical writing demands nothing less than our radically “coming to terms” with linguistic determinism, our bowing down, as it were, to language as invader of the universal problematic, surrendering to language as constitutive power behind all human reality, accepting language as origin and limit of all personal identity, etc. But now we’re being asked to swallow the pill that “language is, by nature, fictional” (Barthes 1981: 87); we find ourselves being told that almighty language—“this alien and inhuman force . . . which tortures and scars our existence as human animals” (Jameson 2006: 393)—isn’t even really real.1 This claim would seem particularly counter-intuitive, since we’re obviously really using language at the present moment to communicate, or because the very assertion that “language is by nature fictional” must be made in language, therefore language must exist, and so on. So where does theory get off, telling us on the one hand that we’re made out of language and then on the other that language is nothing but fiction? To understand the real significance of the claim that significance isn’t real, to grasp “the virtual [fictional or unreal] character of the symbolic order [as] the very condition of human historicity” (Žižek 1999/2002: 241), we need first to situate fictionality between relative unrealness and absolute nonexistence. To say, with Roland Barthes, that language is nothing but fiction, to 1

When Roland Barthes makes this remark in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, he is specifically reflecting upon language’s problem with authentication as compared to the camera’s capacity for more veridical documentation (i.e., the now dated, prePhotoshop idea that “the camera doesn’t lie”). Compare the evidentiary value of a sworn statement such as “I was the man, I suffered, I was there” with an un-doctored photograph that might conclusively prove that I was, let’s say, really a woman enjoying myself elsewhere.

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say, with the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, that language is “a form and not a substance” (1959: 122; Adventures: 47), is not to say, absurdly, that language doesn’t exist; it is to say that language is not a substantial thing, but it’s not to say that there’s “no such thing” as language. For, after all, fiction obviously exists: it’s demonstrably not the case that there’s “no such thing” as fiction, and I could give you a fairly substantial list of not too shabby examples thereof (Antigone, Beloved, Candide, Disgrace, Ethan Frome, Germinal, Hamlet, Infinite Jest, Kangaroo, Lolita, Molloy, and so on). So since there clearly are such “things” in the world as “pieces of fiction,” to say that language is by nature fictional is not to say that language doesn’t exist. But to assert language’s “natural” fictionality is to foreground its unnaturalness, its “virtual character,” and, in that quite specific sense, its antiphysical unrealness. For “fiction,” by definition, isn’t real. Just as human beings must distinguish themselves from non-human animal nature in order to live as human beings, as subjects of human reality, so “fiction” must bring itself into existence as fiction by formally distinguishing itself from the really real. Fiction’s very existence as fiction definitionally depends upon this separation from the real, this active negation of the real. If a little piece of fiction, like that bit from Henry James that he calls “The Real Thing,” were somehow to become the real thing, to become real, to become “fact,” it would thereby cease to be fiction, no? Well, in much the same way, the existence of language as language depends upon a similar separation from and negation of the real. So we might venture to rewrite and expand upon Barthes’ claim that language is by nature fictional as follows: Language exists, to be sure, but it’s not real. It cannot possibly be real. In order to be language, to exist as language, language must separate itself from the real thing, cut itself off from the really real. If language were somehow to become real, to merge with the real, to become identical with the real, it would, by definition, cease to exist: or, at least, it would no longer be language (though whatever it would be I really can’t say). Language, in other words, comes into existence not by positively but vaguely “saying something,” but rather by negatively and specifically having “said” no to the real. Whatever language affirmatively says, it says only by virtue of this primordially prohibitive no. This negation of the real, this prohibition against identity with the real, is language’s existential condition of possibility. Some examples drawn from the realms of words and things might help us out here, so let’s say that in order to mean “elephant,” the word “elephant” cannot be an elephant. A complete merger of the meaningful word with the elephantine thing would not be possible, would not be meaningful. Of course, nothing prevents me from saying the word “elephant” in the real physical presence of a pachyderm or even from painting the word “elephant” on the said elephant’s

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hide. The word’s meaning, however, in no way depends upon that real, hidebound presence in order to mean. Rather, the word’s meaning depends upon the real thing’s absence, its disappearance, its non-being. In language, in other words, there can never be a completely real coincidence of being and meaning. For “to mean,” as Barbara Johnson writes, “is automatically not to be. As soon as there is meaning, there is difference” (1981: ix; Adventures: 100). But let’s get “down to earth” here and literally (that is to say, figuratively) run this point into the ground. Let’s say that even if I were to trace the word “dirt” into the very ground, into an actual spread of real dirt, the fingered word “dirt” still wouldn’t be dirt; it would merely mean dirt. What allows the meaning of the word “dirt” to emerge from the dirt is nothing other than the four letters, the purely formal delineations of non-dirt, that I’ve traced into the dirty surface. These formal delineations, these narrow defiles of non-dirt within otherwise unfurrowed substance—these non-substantial fissures within formlessly real soil—become the existential openings (the very souls, if you like) of meaning itself. Meaning must formally or soulfully separate itself out, must cleanse itself of and distinguish itself from formlessly real being, in order to raise itself up out of the really real as clear or distinct meaning. Meaning must mean non-merger with murkily real being. The veritable “law” of meaning means quite precisely that the word for “elephant” must not be elephant, that the word for “dirt” must not be dirt. We can take the letter of this “law” back to our previous lesson. Its significance is not simply that “meaning is the polite word for pleasure.” Our lesson’s actual significance is that pleasure itself is a polite word for pleasure, that any meaningful word (pleasure, elephant, dirt) is a “polite” substitute for and separation from the real thing or experience that it names. To mean “pleasure,” the word “pleasure” is prohibited from really being pleasure. I don’t mean to say that saying the word “pleasure” can’t be pleasurable, can’t be a form (however attenuated) of enjoyment. I do mean to say that saying “pleasure” never necessarily depends upon one’s really experiencing pleasure; rather, the word “pleasure” depends upon the possibility of our not really enjoying ourselves, of our not experiencing real pleasure; it depends upon the possibility of pleasure’s non-presence. If one could say “pleasure” and really mean it only if one were at the precise moment of enunciation really experiencing a pleasure that was not only completely identical with the word but in fact caused one to say it, then the word “pleasure” as word would not be possible. The word “pleasure” need not be caused or accompanied by real pleasure any more than the exclamation “ouch” need be caused or accompanied by actual pain: we can say “ouch” even when we’re not being bitten or stung or insulted, and we can say “pleasure” even at moments—such as perhaps this very one—when we’re not having any fun at all.

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II: Giving (up) the finger Again, what makes the presence of any word possible is nothing but the possible absence of the real thing or experience it names, which is precisely why Lacan characterizes the word as “a presence made of absence.” In order for the symbolic object freed from its usage to become the word freed from the hic et nunc [here and now], the difference resides . . . in its vanishing being in which the symbol finds the permanence of the concept. Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named . . . And from this articulated couple of presence and absence . . . a language’s world of meaning is born, in which the world of things [must] situate itself ” (1966d/2006: 228).

For Lacan, the ways by which language is “by nature fictional” are intimately related to the rules and regulations that make meaning the polite word for pleasure in a world that must be made to mean. In other words, for Lacan, our linguistic separation from and negation of “the real” has everything to do with what he calls “the symbolic order,” the imperative processes of anthropogenesis that we belabored in our first two lessons. To demonstrate the relations among these lessons even further, however, I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you the finger. That is to say, I’m going to have to ask you to imagine that you are a very young child, in the very last stages of your infancy, not yet “in language” but on the cusp of “learning to read” in the sense described in the previous lesson. Imagine, if you can, that I am the adult standing before you, trying to give you one of your first “reading” lessons. In this imaginary scene, I am using not my middle but rather my index finger to indicate something “over there” to which I want to direct your attention, some real thing other than my finger that I employ my finger to point out to you. You, however, continue to stare at my pointing finger, blissfully unaware that “pointing” is what I’m attempting to accomplish with this digit. I can therefore jab and gesticulate as much as I please, but you simply won’t get the picture; you won’t get the point of my pointing. Illiterate infant that you are, you don’t yet know how to “read,” so you don’t understand that this finger isn’t merely a finger, a column of flesh moving back and forth in space, in a relatively undifferentiated, pointless, or meaningless “here and now.” Incapable as yet of meaningful speech, you don’t realize that, in giving you the finger, I am giving or trying to give you a sign. Not yet up to speed on your structural linguistics, you don’t comprehend that this “indexical” sign is comprised of a signifier (the index finger as pointer)

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and a signified (the point, the “concept” I’m trying to convey, which in this case is “hey, look over there”). Nor do you yet grasp that the function of a sign (signifier and signified combined) is to refer to something else, something other, a referent (in this case, whatever the stupid or wonderful thing “over there” is that I for some reason want you to look at).2 Because you don’t yet “get” any of these points, because you’re not yet in any position to take pointers, you won’t take your eyes off my fascinating finger. I might as well be gesturing to a gerbil. Now, if all I really wanted from this exercise were simply to get you to “look over there,” then I could finally resort to just picking your little ass up and pointing your little eyes in the thing’s direction so that you would finally really see it. But we would have accomplished very little by these merely physical acrobatics. Therefore, because what I must want is for you to learn to read, not simply see, I must make you see this thing (my finger) not just as a real thing floating around in this immediate space but as a veritable sign indicating some other thing elsewhere. To give you the finger as mediating sign, I must gently or sternly deny you the finger as finger. To teach you to “read” finger as sign, I must, as it were, wean you from finger qua finger. And this weaning denial will no doubt initiate itself in the form of the prohibitive word no, as in, no, don’t look at my finger, look over there; no, dumbass, not this stupid thing but that one; no, you cannot just keep staring at my finger; no, you must tear yourself away from the real flesh and look to that “other scene” to which the flesh is pointing; no, our flesh and bone can’t just be pointless boney flesh, it all must signify something; no, our fingers can’t just be, they must mean, must be ordered, must be named. And the same thing goes for you too, sweetie, for here is where you reach “the point when [your] polymorphous lack of differentiation gives way [as it must] to differences and taxonomies” (Roof 2016: 59).3 Not that sweet little infant you would actually take in any of these words, even though according to Lacan you’ve “always already” been taken in by them insofar as language always “exists prior to each subject’s entrance into it at a certain moment in [its] psychic development” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 413). But if you’re ever going to become anything more and other than a sweet or

2

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All of these terms—signifier, signified, sign, referent—pertain to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, which we will explore at greater length in Lesson Eight. It’s worth pointing out here that those last quoted words come from Judith Roof ’s What Gender Is, What Gender Does. It’s also worth further quoting Roof to the effect that what gender does “is to signal, mask, obscure, suggest, mislead, misrecognize, and simplify the uncontainable, uncategorizable chaos of desires and incommensurabilities characteristic of [human] subjects. Gender’s job is always to make the subject fit” (2016: vii).

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squawking little beast, you must begin to hear that sour note; you must begin to understand the “negating” function of the first word in each of my prohibitory but literacy-enabling phrases (no, don’t look at my finger, no, not here but there, and so on); moreover, you must on some level “understand” that this singularly prohibitive and negative word no actually precedes and precipitates all the words and all the phrases that you’re ever going to understand in your life. The world that you are sentenced to enter must be made to mean, but it’s precisely this primordial “no to the real” that first makes any meaning happen, that initially gets any sentence in any language up and running, by preventing any word you can imagine from ever really being the real thing that it names. Erecting, so to speak, a permanent and irreversible divide or discordance between real being and significant meaning, this primordial no is baked into and basically causes or makes possible any articulation whatsoever. In order to signify anything, a sign can never be a simple, indivisible, absolute “thing in itself ” but must always separate itself into a signifier and a signified, a pointer and a point. In order to be a meaningful word, a word can never simply remain what it “really” is—a certain quantum of sheer materiality, of ink on a page or chalk on a board or pixels on a screen. No, it must articulate a message, and back behind any articulation lurks the fundamental imperative of the symbolic order, which is simply this word: no. No, you can’t keep looking here for your pleasure; no, you can’t simply remain in the pure pleasure principle of the immediate experience of real being; as per the last two words of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, no, you can’t stay here, no, you can’t even stay there, no, you must “go on” (1955: 414).

III: Thanks for nothing The real being that meaning must leave behind in order to “go on” meaning is “the Real” in Lacan’s sense, the “oceanic feeling” in Freud’s: a formless limitless undifferentiated experience of the “all” of the hic et nunc, the immediately here and now. Meaning, as such, formally cuts into and incisively removes us from our experience of that simple “immediate” being and “sends” us, as if we ourselves were letters, on our limited, grammatically regulated, and politely articulated way. For it’s the real function of any meaningful word to tear us away from immediate being, to deliver us from the undifferentiated darkness of “the Real always lurking dimly in the background” (Jameson 2006: 376), and send or carry us in a brighter, more promisingly significant direction. Any meaningful word must point us away from itself and prod us to “go on” to the next word in the chain of signifiers (so please imagine my exemplary

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finger as pointing from left to right, the direction in which we in English read). The word “the,” for example, the so-called “definite article,” seems to say something positively “in itself ” to its reader—something affirmative, like “My name is ‘the’ and I am the definite article.” But even if it is the definite article, which it is, “the” still isn’t simply the real thing; because it’s a word, the word “the” still must always “say no” to whatever real thing or stuff (like ink or sound) that it might substantially be. In other words, the word “the” can never allow its reader to stay with it. Like the fallen grunt in the military action film who waves his comrades on, heroically urging the rest of the squad to keep going, the word “the” must always impel the reader to abandon it, to leave it behind, to keep moving on—if only . . . just one more space . . . to . . . the . . . right. In other words, if it’s going to do the right thing, the word “the” must always carry out its symbolic orders and the symbolic order itself: the word “the” must prod . . . the reader . . . to move on to the . . . next word in the . . . temporal sequence of meaning that we . . . call . . . the . . . sentence.4 As these annoyingly retarded articulations might help me suggest, “language is by nature fictional” not only because, like fiction, it isn’t really real but also because, like fiction, it usually involves something resembling narrative design, the formal manipulation of merely chronological revelation upon which the craft or sullen art of narration depends.5 Certain exercises in the art of the sentence—consider the hard work of a Henry James or a David Foster Wallace or a Sylvia Wynter—can read like gnarly epics. But even the briefest of complete and fully predicated sentences, even those completely innocent of craft, still manage to tell a little story, unfold a tale, relate the dramatic adventures of a grammatical subject, verbalize an action, enact a beginning, stage a middle, and struggle towards an end, providing, perhaps, a relatively satisfying sense of narrative closure.6 But if language is “fictional” not only because it de-realizes but also because it “narrates,” just what sort of story does language actually tell? For Lacan, the story of language always at some level involves Oedipus, or Oedipal desire. Lacan, that is, rather tirelessly (and, for some, tiresomely) relates 4

5

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Unless of course the “the” in question is that last word of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in which case the reader is compelled to circle back to the text’s first word, “riverrun,” and begin the fictional experience all over again. “The narrative theory of Russian Formalism distinguishes between story (fabula) and plot (sujet), between the story and the way it is told. Fabula . . . refers to the story as it might have occurred in real time and constitutes the raw narrative material awaiting the formal manipulation of the author. Sujet . . . designates the authorial transformation worked upon the story” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 106). “Structurally, narrative shares the characteristic of the sentence without ever being reducible to the sum of its sentences: a narrative is a long sentence, just as every constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative” (Barthes 1966/1977: 84).

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language acquisition to what Freud famously dubs the Oedipus complex.7 But Lacan “Oedipalizes” our accession to language not simply for psychological reasons, not simply because language acquisition and the onset of the Oedipus complex can be said to “happen” at roughly the same time in the child’s psychological development; rather, Lacan links language to Oedipus for “structural” reasons. He posits, that is, a structural analogy between the primordially discordant “no to the real” that initiates all access to language and the “paternal” prohibition against incest that bars all sexual access to the mother’s body and thereby founds any “civilization,” any exogamous social order whatsoever.8 Obviously, Lacan’s analogy goes against the grain of consciously common sense; after all, it’s pretty hard to grasp what our conventionally grammatical desire to make complete sentences might have in common with our unconsciously Oedipal desire to “make it” with the moms. But if you can 7

8

The Oedipus complex involves the idea that every child unconsciously desires complete “possession” of the mother and thus jealously and aggressively regards the father as a rival. Freud names this complex after the tragic title figure in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, the man who consciously attempts to avoid his “fate” (an oracle tells him that he will murder his father and fornicate with his mother) and thus unwittingly blunders into it. Freud also offers an Oedipal interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, suggesting that Hamlet can’t bring himself to kill Claudius because Hamlet unconsciously identifies with the man who has done in real life what Hamlet himself desires to do in his dreams: dispatch the father and “marry” the mother. I’ll note here that Jean-Michel Rabaté’s chapter on “Psychoanalytic Theory” in the BHLCT discusses Freud’s and Lacan’s takes on Hamlet quite a bit. As we read in the footnote on “Primordial Discord” in Lesson Two, Freud in Totem and Taboo employs the speculative fable about the murder of the “primal father” by the other male members of the “primal horde” to account for the institution of the law against incest and the subsequent founding of “civilization.” Here I’d like to pause to link Freud’s story about the murdered father with my story about the index finger given to you in the “reading exercise” above. There I wrote that if all I wanted to do was to get you to “look over there” to where my finger was pointing, I could physically pick you up and point your eyes in the right direction. But if there were more than one of you, and I wanted you all to “look over there,” it would be difficult for me to perform that trick because I would have to pick you up and point you in the right direction one “little animal” at a time. It would be more effective for me to teach you all to “read the signs” so that when I pointed over there with my finger you would all simultaneously turn away from me and my finger and stare at the referent. But it’s sort of the same story with the “primal horde.” In the beginning, the still-living primal father could sexually separate the sons and brothers from the sisters and mothers only physically, serially, one “beast with two backs” at a time. But once he’s been killed and eaten and his “law” has been internalized by the whole gang, his formerly merely physical and limited intervention becomes an antiphysical or ghostly verbal prohibition, a prohibitive but unlimited “no” that all the bros can say to themselves all at the same time in order to point themselves in the right direction (i.e., away from the horde’s now-prohibited mujeres). My point here is that, from a Lacanian perspective, there’s a “primordial” connection between the “no of the father” in Freud’s fable and the “no to the finger” in my short story. But if you want to know (and maybe you don’t!) what any of these matters have to do with you and your mother, you’ll have to keep reading.

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understand how “the symbolic order” as the “law” of meaning that separates you from your immediately real being and subjects you to conventional rules of grammar and syntax might be analogous to “the symbolic order” as the “law against incest” that separates you from the maternal body and subjects you to the conventional regulations of normative heterosexuality, then you basically get the Lacanian picture. If you can understand that “meaning” means both that you can no longer simply be in the undifferentiated Real and that you can no longer “be with” your mother in the exclusive way that you might unconsciously desire, if you can understand that “the symbolic order” is an “order to symbolize” your mother (and everything else in the world) rather than “totally” be with her as if you and she were “everything” and there really were nothing or no one else out there—then you’re well on your way to speaking basic Lacanese (whether you want to be or not). But let’s leave Lacan, not to mention our poor mothers, out of this discussion for the moment and return to the question of “real being” and of language’s fictionalizing negation thereof. I’ve suggested that linguistic meaning tears us away from the pure unmediated “here and now” of real being and sends us on our intelligibly articulated way. I’ve insisted that, consequent to this “tearing,” there is an irrevocable split or rupture between being and meaning. A word, as I insist (or as the very pronoun “I” insists), can never be the thing that it names (elephant, dirt, me, etc.), and a thing (like my dirty finger) can never remain a simple, self-identical thing if it is ever made to function as a sign. But is it a “good thing” or a “bad thing” that “the word” can never be “the real thing”? It depends, perhaps, upon the specific word in relation to the particular thing. To illustrate this “moral relativism,” we can note a rather interesting thing that happens late in Don DeLillo’s short novel The Body Artist, a sort of postmodern ghost story that, like most of DeLillo’s fictions, meditates upon the strange and (in DeLillo’s view) occasionally miraculous things that can happen in contemporary (fictional) encounters between language and the real. The story concerns a woman, Lauren Hartke, a performance or “body artist” who, while mourning the death of her filmmaker husband, apparently discovers a strange quasi-person living in her (formerly their) house. This male semi-personage may be the embodied ghost of Lauren’s husband, or he may be an imaginary figment that Lauren is cooking up for one of her embodied performance-art pieces, or he may simply be “a retarded man” (2001:102) who has wandered away from some nearby institution. Whatever he may be or mean, this figure—nameless, though Lauren for reasons of her own calls him “Mr. Tuttle”—is presented to us as suffering from a disorder of speech, a sort of linguistic indeterminism. Mr. Tuttle speaks, utters intelligible and even uncannily familiar words, but

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he is still paradoxically caught up in what the narrator calls “the not-as-if of things” (2001: 92). We are told a number of things about Mr. Tuttle, but the most pertinent for our purposes here is that he “hasn’t learned the language. There has to be an imaginary point [says our narrator], a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he [Mr. Tuttle] is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings” (2001: 101). And because he is so alien to this linguistic crossing, because he cannot quite successfully use good old words to cognitively map his “being in the world,” Mr. Tuttle, we are told, “violates the limits of the human” (2001: 102). This description of Mr. Tuttle’s loss of bearings makes it sound “as if ” he’s in an unbearably inhuman spot. And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) his strange violation of human limits, Mr. Tuttle manages to say some lovely brilliant things. For example: He said, “The word for moonlight is moonlight.” [And] this made [Lauren] happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true—or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be. (2001:84)

Now, bear in mind that Mr. Tuttle isn’t simply being tautological here. He isn’t just elliptically claiming that the word that we use to designate the phenomenon called moonlight is this specific word, “moonlight.” Rather, he claims, flat-out, “straight as straight can be,” that the word moonlight really is moonlight. This “poetical” merging of word with wave strikes Lauren as “beautiful” and thus makes her “happy,” thus reminding us of Stendhal’s tragicomic characterization of “beauty” as “the promise of happiness.” But even though it makes her happy because she finds it beautiful—and even though a line from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” instructs us that the “articulated couple” or aesthetic/veridical copulation of beauty with truth is all we know and all we need to know—is Lauren “right” to consider Mr. Tuttle’s statement “true”? Doesn’t this “logically complex” statement logically contradict everything we’ve learned in this lesson about the impossibility of a word’s meaning merging with its real being? If “elephant” can’t be an elephant and “dirt” can’t be dirt and “I” can’t be me, how can “moonlight” possibly be moonlight? Truly, maybe sadly, but in the end, I think, quite fortunately, it just can’t be; it can’t possibly simultaneously mean and be. But why the hell not? And what’s so “fortunate” about this sad impossibility of the said? Why might it be a “good thing” that linguistic meaning both makes and breaks the so-called promise of happiness? OK, so Mr. Tuttle’s blurting out that “the word for moonlight is moonlight” makes Lauren happy—fair enough. But we might ask if Lauren would have been made just

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as happy if Mr. Tuttle had proclaimed that “The words for internal hemorrhage are internal hemorrhage”? The sentence is far from beautiful, you’ll agree, but it could only quite disastrously be “true.” For if the statement were “literally” true, then no “body artist” could ever produce the words “internal hemorrhage” without her body’s internally hemorrhaging. Or, to take the art back out of the body, what if Mr. Tuttle had asserted that “the word for excrement is excrement”? It’s hard to imagine that Mr. Tuttle’s pressing those little words out of his uncanny hole would have made Lauren or DeLillo or Keats or any lover of beauty and truth radiantly happy. So, yeah, maybe it’s a real shame that the word for moonlight can never really be moonlight, that we can’t just utter this enchanting word and be instantly bathed in lovely lunar lucidity. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s a relatively good thing that you can ask for a “concrete example” of the difference between being and meaning without having a cinderblock fall on your head. Maybe it’s a good thing that words for real excrement aren’t really excremental things. Maybe it’s a good thing that that we can’t get no scatisfaction, that we’re all able to utter our favorite excremental expressions without finding our mouths filled with you-know-what, that we can read Eliot’s The Waste Land without actually landing in waste, and so on. Maybe, at the end of the day, there’s something to be said for our just saying “no” to non-differentiation, for our being able to distinguish ourselves from the real, simply by saying “no, not really what we had in mind.” Maybe there’s something to be said for being’s being said, even if saying so means forever losing all our oceanic feelings. Maybe there’s something to be said for our being able to say, which is to say, our being able to lie, to fabricate, to negate “the not-as-if of things” by making metaphors, by reading and writing, telling the stories of our so-called lives, proliferating ourselves quite precisely as fictions. Maybe we readers and writers and would-be lovers of literature should be enormously grateful that language is by nature fictional, even if its unstable fabrications actually turn out to be the stuff that we’re made of, even if such gratitude puts us in the exceedingly strange position of having to say thanks to no one for nothing. Yes, the “no to the real” that makes the phrase “real significance” nonsensical, that makes language and hence we ourselves possible, may prevent us from getting all that we might really desire. But such negativity also protects us from getting more than we might really deserve. We may be “real-losers” in the sacrificial exchange of our being for a meaning that can never be completely real again, but, considering what we get out of it, and considering what it gets us out of, we might just have to say that “radically linguistic determinism”—our being sentenced to sentences, to being nothing by nature if not fictionalized characters, anthropomorphized animals at the mercy of language, male and female impersonators in a world that must be

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made to mean—can’t really be the dirtiest trick that was ever played on us. It can’t really be the crappiest thing that ever happened to us. While the slogan “language is by nature fictional” might seem like a raw deal, the worst bit of “ontological bad news” (Butler 1999: 198) ever to hit the fan, it really can’t be the unhappiest headline, the most unpromising piece of prose, that any real fan of writing has ever encountered, that any really appreciative reader of fiction has ever been required to read.

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Three: sign, signifier/signified, referent, narrative/narration, Oedipus complex

Lesson Four

“Desire must be taken literally” —a few words on death, sex, and interpretation

I: “a few words” We often abuse the word “literally,” claiming that we literally died laughing or literally jumped out of our skins when we actually only ever figuratively accomplish such maneuvers. How literally, then, can we take Jacques Lacan when he insists that “desire must be taken literally” (1966f/2006: 518)? What would it mean, and where would it take us, if we were to take Lacan at his word? In Lacan’s own words—as registered in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or, Reason Since Freud”—to take desire “literally” means to take it “à la lettre” (1966e/2006: 413), to the letter. And the “letter” to which Lacan takes us here would seem to follow the same script as the letter we find in l’être pour la lettre, the slogan Lacan uses to describe our exchange of being for meaning, the loss of real being that we all incur upon our anthropogenetic gain of recognizably human significance. So when Lacan writes that “desire must be taken literally,” to the letter, he means that “desiring” and “lettering” are pretty much the same thing, or rather the same non-thing, that desire and signification are both precipitated by the same “no” to the real thing, the same negation of the real, that we encountered and belabored in the previous lesson. Because “for Lacan, human desire (in contrast to animal instinct) is always, constitutively, mediated by reference to Nothingness” (Žižek 1999/2008: 126), we should take his phrase “desire must be taken literally” to mean both that “desire” itself is literally nothing—“the revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality” (Kojève 1947/1980: 5)—and that the signifier itself is, again, literally nothing, “a presence made of absence” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 228), never (again) the completely real thing. Insisting that desire means incompletion, that in desire, as in signification, something real always goes missing, Lacan means that meaning always means the loss of the real thing, that language presupposes a radical subtraction of being, that signification is always constituted around a 66

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central and defining lack. And since we ourselves—as distinctly human beings, or non-animal animals—are always constituted in and by signification, we ourselves must be subjects of this very lack. For better or worse, Lacan chooses to speak of this situation, of our situation (in contrast to the non-human animal’s completely instinctual situation), in terms of symbolic castration—in terms that are to be taken not anatomically or biologically but, quite literally, “literally.”1 Taken literally, then, desire involves our significant (albeit unconscious) attempts to get the missing real thing back, to overcome our symbolic castration, strenuous efforts animated by nostalgic fantasies of “totally” returning to the lost homeland of the real. But because these attempts and efforts are totally fantasmatic—imaginary and symbolic, not “really real” but only ever the signifying traces of the real’s inexorable withdrawal—nothing is more impossible than our desired recovery of the real thing. Because the word “must” in the slogan “desire must be taken literally” corresponds intimately to the same imperative in the axiom “the world must be made to mean,” nothing is less possible, nothing is less meaningful—and, finally, paradoxically, nothing is less desirable—than our desired restoration of really real being, our desired return to the real: it’s literally the last thing we’d ever want to happen. To begin to hash these matters out, let’s return not to the real but to Lacan’s distinctions among need, demand, and desire, touched upon but lightly in Lesson Two. Let’s see if we can see how these three modalities might instructively be mapped onto Lacan’s three registers of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. Let’s see if we can see how need seeps into the real, how the

1

Judith Roof writes that we can understand symbolic castration “figuratively as the moment individuals begin to recognize difference—that they are separable and perpetually separated from their environment and from others around them.” In this sense castration “signals the point when a polymorphous lack of differentiation gives way to differences and taxonomies. If we understand castration as the process which institutes the lack of connection and satisfaction that inaugurates desire and language, then the castration complex has everything to do with the compensatory meanings endowed by divisions, taxonomies, and intelligibility. These compensations are founded on the incommensurate translation of multiple possibilities into the rigid, ill-fitting templates produced by cultures as the necessary foundation for the divisions of law and power. Appended to desire and basic to language, these divisions substitute for what can never be had again (a lack of differentiation [a.k.a, the “oceanic feeling”—CT]) as well as what may be desired (the Other, whatever that is)” (2016: 59). See also my “brief piece” on “Symbolic Castration” in Adventures in Theory (2019: 134–5). Note that, in Roof ’s description, castration involves our moving, as it were, from one “lack” to another—from a lack of differentiation (in the oceanic Real) to a lack of indifferentiation in the taxonomical Symbolic. In either case, mes amis, in Lacan’s world what universally unifies us is lack—which means we’re all pretty much “castrated” wherever the hell we go.

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imaginary reflects demand, and how the symbolic order provokes and perpetuates—but never fully satisfies—desire.2 Since I desire to interpret these inter-knotted trios under the general rubric of anthropogenesis, or the question of what “makes us human,” let’s begin by noting that at the most basic level of organic need there’s really nothing that radically distinguishes us from nature, from animals and plants, from eagles and oak trees or earthworms and algae. Fish, flesh, or fowl; flora, fauna, or fledgling folk; all organisms need air, water, food, maybe a little light, to live and not die. At this basic or beginner’s level of sheer nutritional need, then, we’re all pretty much in the same boat. Or rather, since at this level “we” living organisms are all missing the metaphorical boat—missing, that is, if we’re plants, animals, or human infants, any firmly differentiated egocoherence, buoyant personhood, or “ship-shape” sense of self—let’s say that at the level of need “we” all seem to sink, swim, or “run together” in the undifferentiated “ocean” of the biologically determined real.3

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I should tell you that the standard mapping in Lacanian studies links the real with the Freudian id or “it” (das Es), the imaginary with “the ego” (das Ich), and the symbolic with “the super-ego” (Uber-Ich). The cartography I’m about to lay out here doesn’t contradict that standard but more or less supports it. I do understand that, according to Tom Eyers, the Lacanian Real “must be distinguished from any broader concept of ‘reality’,” that “reality, for Lacan is generated across the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic,” and that “in some of his earlier texts, the Real as a substantive is occasionally used to designate something like biological need.” But I also understand, again from reading Eyers, that the Real for Lacan is also “distinct from biological ‘need’ ” (2012: 4) and cannot be reduced to such matters. Nonetheless, I will continue in this lesson to connect the Real to biological need because I really (that is, rhetorically) need “it” to be. Excursus on “missing the boat”: There are a number of sources for all this “nautical” talk about the undifferentiated real, this “sea of yolky enjoyment” (Žižek 1992: 40) where “things . . . at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229). For Freud, as we’ve seen, the infant in the “primary narcissism” of the real experiences a putatively “oceanic feeling,” the overwhelming sensation of “an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole” (1930/1989: 723). Freud’s “oceanic feeling” of course precedes anyone’s sense of ego-coherence, predates any firm “sense of self ”; in Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes that “originally the ego [das Ich] includes everything, [but] later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present egofeeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of . . . an all-embracing . . . feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world” (1930/1989: 724–5). For Georges Bataille, this all-embracing and relatively ego-free world is both dissolutely oceanic and saturated with animality; in the “Animality” chapter of his Theory of Religion, that is, Bataille writes that “every animal is in the world like water in water” (1973/1989: 19), and, in Bataille’s thinking, the difference between animals (thoroughly saturated with their own being) and humans (relatively desiccated by their own meanings) involves the difference between continuity and discontinuity with this soggy water-world. Anticipating Freud and Bataille, Nietzsche, in Birth of Tragedy, discusses the formation of the principium individuationis—the Apollonian “principle of individuation,” as opposed to Dionysian self-dissolution—in notably nautical terms, quoting Schopenhauer: “ ‘As a sailor sits in a small boat in a boundless raging sea, surrounded on

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But there is one particular aspect of incipient human existence that does distinguish us from every other chicken in the sea, and that’s the fact that we really need more than all those other organisms in the real, thanks to the primordially discordant “vital insufficiency” (Lacan 1966b/2006: 72) that stems from our specific prematurity at birth, discussed at some length in Lesson Two. The fact that our earliest needs are more pronounced (compared to those of the more vitally sufficient neonates) inevitably compels us to have to pronounce them, to make them known to others, even if, as newborns, we can’t yet make them nouns. In terms of the Lacanian registers, we might say that our capacity while as yet still mewling infants to express without nominating our real needs situates us at the imaginary level of demand. Demand allows us to make our first feeble movements out of the oceanic real, where all things run together, to crawl up and flop around on relatively drier land. The capacity for demand, that is, separates us, though only partially, from the swirling stew of sheer mute need: demand-capability, that is, distinguishes us from all vegetable matter—from seaweed, for example, which as far as I know can’t demand anything—but not from all animals. For just as human infants can and do issue demands, quite vocally, in the form of grating inarticulate bleats and squeals, so can certain non-human animals let their pressing needs be known.

all sides by heaving mountainous waves, trusting to his frail vessel; so does the individual man sit calmly in the middle of a world of torment, trusting to the principium individuationis’ ” (1872/2006: 44). Arguably, Nietzsche’s “frail vessel” and Freud’s “shrunken residue” and Bataille’s all too human “fish out of water” are all figures for egocoherence, for the firm “sense of self ” that the pre-linguistic “little human animal,” like any other piece of yolky flotsam in the real, lacks. It’s this lack of a discernable “sense of self ” that I’m addressing when I suggest that in the realm of real need “we” are all “missing the boat.” Correspondingly, those of us organisms who come (or get) to possess a strong “sense of self,” who are “on board” and thus no longer missing the metaphorical boat, are, by definition, missing the real. In other words, persons defined as persons are always missing the real, and the real is always definitionally missing persons. On the other hand, recalling Toni Morrison’s observation in Beloved that “definitions belong to the definers— not the defined” (1987/2004: 225), we can say that one “self-defined” person’s take on “all this ‘nautical’ talk” may very well differ from an other’s, depending on whether the person in question gets to “own” their own definitions or has historically been defined by some other “owner” as a reified thing rather than as a human person. Here I’m of course marking the distinction between Nietzsche’s figuratively “frail vessel” and that actual armada of “slave vessels” that traversed the Atlantic Ocean transporting a dehumanized “human cargo.” I’m again remembering Hortense Spillers remembering “those African persons in the ‘Middle Passage’ [who] were literally suspended in the ‘oceanic,’ if we think of the latter in its Freudian orientation as an analogy for undifferentiated identity” (1987: 72). In other words, I’m remembering all those persons—“Sixty Million and more,” as we read on the dedication page of Beloved—who, to put it too mildly, probably wouldn’t have minded missing the damn boat.

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Demand, then, like need, remains an aspect of animality; it is not yet desire, which, in this interpretation, exclusively involves the human. Demand, that is, can be said to correspond to the register of the imaginary, the embodied realm of the visible world (in which all animals with eyes take part), but demand does not yet coordinate with the symbolic, which organizes or structures specifically human reality. Animals can of course not only see but communicate, can send and receive “vital signs,” signals that (again, as far as I know) pertain only to the protection-enhancement-continuation (or even enjoyment) of their biological species-life, with which they are (again, arguably) completely identical, as per Georges Bataille’s claim that every animal is in its world “like water in water” (1973/1989: 19). But even “signaling” animals, from warblers to whales, lack language in the “vitally mortifying” sense that is specific to human reality; their signals, that is, can neither separate them from nor ever become more significant than their immediately animal life, whereas our signs not only can and do but must separate us from our purely corporeal existence, our simply anatomical destiny, our merely animal instincts. Unlike human desire, which must be taken literally, to the letter, animal instinct is never “mediated by reference to Nothingness” (Žižek 1999/2008: 126). Unlike us, animals don’t have to repress or negate some aspect of their animality in order to become or remain the animals that they are. Unlike us, animals shake off nothing of their “real being” in their ecstasies of communication, while we non-animal animals can be said to lose everything but our symbolic meaning—lose our sense of being (lost in) everything—when we first find ourselves distinctly located in language. This “total loss” as loss of totality turns us from organisms of real need, or animals of imaginary demand, into symbolically ordered subjects of desire.4 4

Excursus on ecstasy and trauma: If we lose our sense of being (lost in) everything by finding ourselves cohering as individual selves in language, then we can regain that sense only by “losing ourselves,” losing our singular and isolated sense of self-coherence, escaping our enclosure in what Nietzsche in Birth of Tragedy calls “the miserable glass shell of human individuality” (Nietzsche 1872/2006: 82). We can experience loss of self as ecstasy (via sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, booze, arena sports, mysticism, religious fervor, or some combination thereof) or as trauma (via war, sexual assault, natural disaster, animal attacks, etc.). But the line separating ecstasy from trauma is easily transgressed (when great rough sex gets too rough to stay great, or when we overdose on drugs or religious fervor or conspiracy theories and turn into fanatics, or when the drunken crowd in the “Dionysian” mosh pit or sports arena riots and “Apollonian” people get their “principles of individuation” crushed to bloody pulp). The point here is that “you” as a point, as a punctually coherent self, can never return to the real as such, mainly because you were formed as a “you” by being separated from the real by the symbolic order. Like language itself, “you” exist, but you’re not real; if “you” were to become real, to merge with the real, “you” would cease to exist, lose your “personal identity.” The real, again, is always “missing persons,” and persons qua persons are always missing the real, so if anything returns to the real, it’s not going to be “you personally.” Any return to the real would involve a

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Now, it should be fairly easy to see how need corresponds to the organic real, how animal demand can be distinguished from botanical need, and thus how human beings are a bit closer to monkeys than we are to moss. But other than the fact that irises don’t have eyes, what decisively links demand to the imaginary? To grasp this connection, let’s momentarily bracket the difference between need and demand and consider instead the difference between the imaginary and the symbolic. And, to use a few terms from Freud, let’s say that the difference between imaginary demand and symbolic desire involves the difference between “thing-presentations” and “word-presentations.”5 As we should be able to see, both physically and psychically, “thing-presentations” function as visual images in a clear-cut, either/or sense: whether in perception or apperception, whether in the eye or in the mind’s eye, a “thing-presentation” exists in such a way that “now you see it, now you don’t.” Thing-presentations, that is, are typically either present or absent; basically, they’re either there or they’re not there. And it is in this respect that images, as thing-presentations, might be said to correspond to demand, at least insofar as demand, in Lacan’s book, is always “for a presence or an absence” (1966g/2006: 579, emphasis added). In other words, what the organism that can demand does demand of a needed or unneeded thing, of some wanted or unwanted thing-presentation, is either for it to “be there” for the organism or for it to get the hell away from the organism. What the “organism of demand” most basically demands is that

5

violation of human limits, an ecstatic/traumatic encounter with the “not-as-if of things.” The great benefit of language, art, and other cultural forms of representation (high and low, tragedy and Wagnerian opera or theatrical S&M, war and horror films, some varieties of porn) is that they allow spectators a close encounter with the ecstatic/ traumatic “not-as-if ” of the real without their ever really being blown away or torn apart or getting anything on them. So Nietzsche argues, sort of, in Birth of Tragedy (minus the bit about horror films and porn). As for actual, extra-representational human experiences, we might offer that one person’s individual or collective ecstasy can be another’s personal or historical trauma. What the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists (who were clearly having the time of their lives) experienced as neo-fascist ecstasy the rest of the nation experienced as a very deep wound to democracy. We might also here recall the long excursus on gender in Lesson Two, Judith Butler’s line that “Discrete genders are part of what ‘humanizes’ individuals within contemporary culture” (Adventures: 244), and the argument that what some humanized individuals may ecstatically experience as gender indifferentiation, others may not be so thrilled about, depending on whether the “mixup” is chosen or forced. When in Morrison’s Beloved the eponymous ghost-child speaks of crouching in the hull of a slave ship and narrates that “in the beginning the women are away from the men and the men are away from the women [but then] storms rock us and mix the men into the women and the women into the men” (250), the “oceanic feeling” she’s recalling isn’t exactly ecstatic. According to Laplanche and Pontalis in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, these are “terms used by Freud in his metapsychological works in order to distinguish between two types of ‘presentation’–between the (essentially visual) type which is derived from things and the (essentially auditory) one derived from words” (1974: 446).

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the image/thing-presentation either appear or disappear, either come closer or keep its distance. Thus, barring some complex visual effect or trompe l’œil in which “objects may be closer than they appear,” thing-presentations are always clearly either/or—they are never both/and—for the organism of demand. Animal or infant, barking dog or squealing kid, the organism physically capable of demand is nonetheless psychically incapable of sustaining the ambiguity and/or ambivalence that the simultaneous both/and of presence/absence demands (of us). And so here’s the crux of the matter: very much unlike imaginary “thingpresentations,” “word-presentations” are nothing but ambiguous instances of the both/and of presence/absence. To re-present Lacan’s and Derrida’s presentations of the “absentations” of words, a word is always a “presence made of absence” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 228); a meaning is always the appearance of the “disappearance of natural presence” (Derrida 1967/1997:159). A “word-presentation” is both a “thing-presentation” and a “non-thing-presentation” at the same time. This both/and condition obtains for the word because, as we’ve read, the word presents or shows itself as a thing but can never be the real thing that it names. Thus a word, rather like a king in Prince Hamlet’s bitingly low estimation, is always ever a “thing of nothing.” And the reference to Hamlet—for whom the famously soliloquized question is “to be or not to be”—isn’t exactly infelicitous here: For the signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence. This is why we cannot say of the . . . letter that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes. (Lacan 1966a/2006:17)

Now, we should be able to recognize that real need, imaginary demand, and symbolic desire all bear on the question of the satisfactions necessary to sustain “life” and/or human reality. And because to be or not yet to be or not at all to be (satisfied) is indeed the question, we should be able to imagine how the tensions among real need, imaginary demand, and symbolic desire coordinate with the conflicts between the pleasure and reality principles that we examined in our earlier lesson. But we should also be able to understand the following distinctions among our inter-knotted trios: In the real, all living organisms need. Moreover, organic need can actually be completely fulfilled. The orchid in the swamp, the mollusk in the shell, the fetus in the womb, can all really, naturally, or umbilically obtain amounts of nutrition vitally sufficient to their days, however numbered, without having, or even being able, to ask.

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In the imaginary, some living organisms do have to ask and are quite capable of demand. Moreover, some demands can be fully met—for if demand is always for a presence or an absence, all things or thing-presentations can either be (seen) or not be (seen), can either be brought closer or chased away, killed off or kept at the ready. But while in the imaginary any given organism may demand a presence or an absence, once the human organism is ensconced in the symbolic, once the fledgling human organism finally learns to turn its needs into nouns, what this non-animal animal gets, and gets to be, is only ever a presence made of absence, a “letter” (like the letter “I”) that will both be (a thing) and not be (the thing that it is), wherever it (or “I”) may go. And the “letter” in question here is of course the letter to which we’re taken if we “take desire literally,” as Lacan insists we must. The letter thus reveals all of human reality as not-all, as never completely here nor there, as, in other words, nothing but the problem of desire. The letter turns all incipient subjects of human reality from demanding organisms with merely real needs into symbolically ordered subjects of anthropogenetic desire. I don’t mean that upon this transformation the “former subject-to-be” no longer experiences any real need, or that it completely gives up on all its merely imaginary demands. I do mean that in entering/following the symbolic order the subject of desire suppresses and surpasses its own real needs and imaginary demands by symbolizing them, putting them into words, taking them literally, to the letter. Only by taking its needs, its demands, and itself “literally” can it “truly” (i.e., not really) become a subject of human reality/desire—a being driven, to be sure, but driven much less by animal instinct than by an ongoing reference to (its own) nothingness. It’s not not for nothing, then, that Lacan writes that language “grabs hold of desire at the very moment it becomes humanized by gaining recognition” (1966d/2006: 243). For Lacan, that is, the desire for recognition, the desire of meaning, is the meaning of humanized desire. If desire is the presence of the absence of a reality, and the word is the presence of the absence of the thing, then linguistically determined or humanized reality is nothing but the appearance of the disappearance of natural presence, the presence of the absence of the real. To insist, then, that “desire must be taken literally” is really only to reiterate our first three lessons (in reverse order), to say once again that “language is by nature fictional,” that “meaning is the polite word for pleasure,” and that “the world must be made to mean.” And having repeated these lessons as often as we now have, we should be better positioned to return all the way back to our “introductory matters” and to better appreciate “what theory does,” to better understand why theoretical writing must reflect on “meaning” as a problem rather than as a given, why theory lives to denaturalize and defamiliarize the desire for meaning as the meaning of

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desire—particularly when theoretical writing gropes and grapples with the meanings of human sexual desire. OK, you might be thinking, it’s about fucking time—all this “theoretical” chatter about “pleasure” and “desire” with only the slightest mention of “real sex”! Well, yes, it is about “fucking time,” so to speak, and we are finally going to say a few words about desire in relation to “real sex” and in relation to real death. But we’re going to have to let death come first.

II: “on death” You might have already noticed its shadow falling upon this discourse. Back in the first lesson, for example, when I asked you to list everything you could think of that separates humans from, say, roosters, you might well have included “awareness of our own mortality” on your roster. Or maybe you got a whiff of the necrotic back when I was giving you the low-down on the pleasure principle’s prime directive. When you read that this principle’s goal is to “reduce unpleasurable tension,” to restore homeostatic quiescence, the thought might have crossed your mind that it’s hard to be much more quiescently homeostatic than stone-cold dead. Freud himself reached the same conclusion, by which I don’t mean that he died, though of course he did, as will you and I, but rather that, in his attempts to think through the problems of the pleasure principle, Freud ends up speculating on Thanatos, the unconscious death drive, which, along with Eros, the unconscious sexual drive, works to shape human psychical reality.6 Well before trotting out the couple Eros and Thanatos, however, Freud begins his great study Beyond the Pleasure Principle by addressing the phenomenon of “repetition compulsion” and by posing the following thorny question: If the goal of the pleasure principle is to avoid unpleasurable tension and restore homeostatic quiescence, why on earth would we compulsively repeat unpleasurable activities or disquieting memories of tense or even traumatic experiences? Freud provisionally answers this question by speculating that we compulsively repeat unpleasure in the attempt to gain a sort of ideational mastery over it and so to recover our lost equilibrium,

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According to Laplanche and Pontalis, Thanatos is the “Greek term (= Death) sometimes used by analogy with ‘Eros’ to designate the death instincts; its use underscores the fundamental nature of the instinctual dualism by lending it a quasi-mythical sense. This name is not to be found in Freud’s writings, but according to [Ernest] Jones he occasionally used it in conversation” (1974: 446).

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fantasmatic endeavors fundamentally in keeping with the pleasure principle’s overriding goal. Freud bases this “masterful” hypothesis upon a number of clinical observations, but what particularly leads him to posit an unconscious death drive is his interpretation of a seemingly simple game played by his eighteenmonth-old grandson, Ernst. In what is now called the fort-da game, little Ernst—a “good boy” who “obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms” and who “never cried when his mother left him for a few hours” (1920/1989: 599)—would be observed (by Freud) fooling around with a wooden reel tied to a piece of string. The child would repeatedly throw the reel away while holding onto the string, making urgent staccato sounds (rendered in the text as “o-o-o-o”) that for Freud approximated the fully fledged German word fort, meaning “gone.” Then, typically, Ernst would pull the reel back in and greet “its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ [‘there’]. . . . This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return” (1920/1989: 599). And, in Freud’s view, the “interpretation of the game” is, at least initially, “obvious”: It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation . . . he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this . . . by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. (1920/ 1989: 600)

But this interpretation, if obvious, is also complicated for Freud by the fact that Ernst sometimes throws the reel away without reeling it back in. This repeated pattern of disappearance and no return contradicts any purely happy reading of the ludic reel as unambiguously representing an unambivalently desired maternal object (since Ernst would ostensibly always want that object back, constantly da rather than ever distressingly fort). As Freud explains: The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending. (1920/1989: 600)

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Now, the fact that in the observed performances of the fort-da game the forts sometimes outnumber the das leads Freud to posit “another motive” behind the Liebestoddler’s staged loss of the reel.7 At the outset he was in a passive situation—he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery . . . But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone’ might satisfy an impulse of the child’s which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ (1920/1989: 600)

Freud’s interpretation of this pint-sized revenger’s tragedy subtly connects “play” in the ludic sense, as game, to “play” in the literary sense, as dramaturgy (note the references to staging, first acts, taking on parts, etc.). And the main piece of dramatic literature Freud has in mind here is pretty obviously Oedipus, for the evidence of Ernst’s being a “good boy” includes his never crying when his mother goes away and his obeying orders not to “go into certain rooms” (forgive me, if you possibly can, but one has only to imagine Fudd rather than Freud reading that line to get the Oedipal gist of which “chambers” Ernst has been symbolically ordered not to go back into).8 Somewhat less obviously, but perhaps no less Oedipally, the fort-da also plays out the whole three-act drama of real need, imaginary demand, and symbolic desire. The game thus leads us, as it led Freud, to the death drive, to the radical idea that “an instinct [or drive] is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (1920/1989: 612) and to the fateful conclusion that “the aim of all life is death” (1920/1989: 613). We are taken to this conclusion literally—that is to say, figuratively. For figurative language allows us to suggest that the earliest “state” of little Ernst’s big ocean of “things” is immersed in the real (if only by virtue of the homonymic coincidence that 7

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I claim full responsibility for this atrocious word “Liebestoddler,” which mashes up the English “toddler” with the German “Liebestod,” or “love-in-death” (taken from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde)—all the better to adumbrate Freud’s argument that the desire for love and the desire for death are disturbingly merged in the playful dynamics of the little boy’s fort-da. “Loony Tunes” cartoon character Elmer Fudd, hapless hunter and principal adversary of Bugs Bunny, is represented as having a speech impediment that causes him to pronounce “rabbit” as “wabbit,” just as Ernst in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is represented as pronouncing “front” as “fwont” (1920/1989: 600). The really bad Oedipal joke here is that in a Fuddian/Freudian reading the word “room” would sound like “womb.”

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one of these things is in English called a reel). If the aim of the death drive is to return to an “earlier state of things” that resembles being in the real, then, we might argue, Ernst expresses his desire to return himself to the real when he returns the reel to himself. We might also argue that Ernst “masterfully” manipulates the real reel both to vocally register imaginary demand (for an absence or a presence, a fort or a da) and to aggressively negate real need (as in the puny and punitive ad-lib “all right, then, go away! I don’t need you”).9 But what separates Ernst’s anthropogenetic antics with the reel from a puppy’s fetching a stick or a kitten’s toying with a piece of string is the fact that in Freud’s reading this reel means something other to the boy than what it really is. In this sense, the reel is symbolic, and, as we are significantly told, the “good boy” manipulates this symbolic object all the better to compensate himself for the very “instinctual renunciation” by which he becomes “good” in the first place, by which he becomes undemanding, able to allow “his mother to go away without protesting” (1920/1989: 600). But it takes more than throwing real things around in the play-pen to turn imaginary demand into symbolic desire: it takes, so to speak, a figurative inkpen, the magical “wand” of words, to perform that anthropogenetic trick. For what’s actually decisive in the fort-da game is not any physical manipulation of real objects but rather the way little Ernst must “write” his way out of the real, must linguistically designate his own relationship to any real object’s disappearance and return. To “literally” free himself from the here and now, Ernst must irrevocably bind his fate to that of the letter. In other words, whatever he may or may not have in his mitts, nothing will be anthropogenetic for Ernst until language grabs hold of the nib of his desire. And, to tell the truth, anthropogenesis just isn’t going to be happening for Ernst until it finally occurs to him to lie —to fabricate, to make stuff up, make the real “go away,” to turn his back, as it were, on “the not-as-if of things.” For it really is as if language will have “truly” grabbed hold of Ernst’s desire only when he becomes a playful liar, a bit of a poet, a ludic little “man of letters” (even if the first letters attributed to him are but the compulsively repeated revelations of an emptiness, an empty set of naughts, a meager series of zeroes strung

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To grasp how Ernst’s physical manipulation of the reel expresses imaginary demand, we can note two details. The first is that when Ernst plays fort-da with the reel, he throws the object “over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappear[s] into it” (1920/1989: 599). Significantly, the game of disappearance/reappearance stresses the visual over the tactile. The second detail is that Ernst would sometimes be observed playing fort-da or “Baby o-o-o-o” with his own image in a mirror: “the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image ‘gone’ ” (Freud 1920/1989: 599n2).

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together in a hyphenated line: “o-o-o-o”).10 Only when simulation and dissimulation become vital sources of stimulation—only when he realizes that he doesn’t have to have a thing in his little hand to give birth to a da, or that he can at any time let out a fort without having cast out any actual reel— does little animal Ernst “literally” begin becoming human. But Ernst enters human reality not simply by using words—presences made of absence—to designate the tangible alternation between presence and absence that he himself causes. No, Ernst liebestoddles into the big empty house of fiction, the world of desire—becomes, again, figuratively speaking, human, a non-animal animal at the mercy of language—only when he accepts that it is figuratively speaking, not really having, not really being, that constitutes the only true “habitat for humanity” in which he or we will ever meaningfully live. In this interpretation, it is only ever language that builds what Martin Heidegger calls “the house of being” (1947/1977: 193), only ever the “world of words that creates the world of things” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229).11 This world, the only world there is, must always be made to mean, and “to mean” must always mean to lose real things, to lack real being—in other words, to desire. But I’ve yet to toss out a compelling interpretation of how this interpretation of desire relates to the death drive. To grasp this relation, we need to return, not to an earlier state of things but to some earlier statements about nothing: specifically, to Kojève’s neat description of desire as the “revelation of an emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality”

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How many o’s does it take to make a fort? In Freud’s first inscription of Ernst’s approximation of the German word for “gone,” there are four letters, or four instances of the same letter: “o-o-o-o.” But in a second inscription, there are, perhaps not insignificantly, only three: As Freud reports, “When this child [Ernst] was five and three-quarters, his mother [Freud’s beloved daughter Sophie] died. Now that she was really ‘gone’ (o-o-o), the little boy showed no signs of grief ” (1920/1989: 599n2). What to make of this emotional no-show, of the fact that here, in Freud’s writing, one lower-case “o”—which can already be read as a zero, a hole, a sign that something’s missing—is itself quite conspicuously missing, no longer “da”? Insofar as that “o” might be read as representing the departed Sophie (not for the son Ernst, who showed no signs of grief, but for the bereft father, Freud), we might speculate that by letting that “o” be “gone” from his writing, by himself staging the absence of a particular presence made of absence, the “philosopher” Freud is showing by not showing the very sign of his grief: “o.” Although some theoretical writers, like Derrida, consider Heidegger to be terribly important (rather than merely terrible), and despite the clear relevance to the present discussion of Heidegger’s notion of “being towards death,” I am omitting any further mention of Heidegger’s philosophy in this book for this simple reason: I simply hate Heidegger. I’ve just never been able to get past the whole business of his having been a bona fide Nazi. Concerning Heidegger’s Nazism, see, for example, Farias (1991). And for what passes for a critique of Derrida’s “retention” of Heidegger, see the chapter on Heidegger and Derrida in my Male Matters (1996).

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(1947/1980: 5) and to Žižek’s assertion that “for Lacan, human desire (in contrast to animal instinct) is always, constitutively, mediated by reference to Nothingness” (1999/2008: 126). Taking these lines of thought literally, we can better comprehend not what desire literally is (because it literally isn’t any thing) but rather the way desire formally works (with “formally” here meaning without regard to any particular content, any specific object of desire). Formally, then, if there is desire, if desire exists, if desire is “present,” then some reality or object of desire must be absent. If the desired reality weren’t absent, then desire wouldn’t be present: the desideratum’s “full presence” would spell desire’s complete cancellation. Desire as emptiness, as nothingness, would necessarily terminate itself in its utter fulfillment. Thus, in the purely formal sense, the desire of desire must be to end itself, to cancel itself out, as desire. By definition, then, desire desires to kill itself; structurally, desire desires suicide, and so on. But if there’s something structurally and constitutively “self-destructive” about the desire of desire, there’s also something animatedly “self-protective” about it as well. Desire, that is, may very well desire to end itself, but at the same time desire desires to sustain itself, to go on and on, to continue to make its presence felt by literally “staying hungry,” by remaining insistently empty, dissatisfied, discontented, constantly deferring or negating or “sending away” the absent but approaching “reality” whose fully satisfying presence would inevitably bring desire to its (un)desired conclusion. Desire in this sense desires to keep playing fort/da: it is nothing but the longing to keep on longing to reach the end, the longing to keep on longing to grasp the thing at the end of the line. Formally, then, desire “literally” self-perpetuates by putting off its ending, by only ever circling but never seizing its object, remaining the garrulously active revelation of its own emptiness or nothingness or restless discontent. It is in this sense that desire can be conflated not simply with “death” or “the dead” but, more strictly speaking, with the death drive. And the vital irony of the death drive involves this very discrepancy between merely “being dead” and actively “being death”—the tension between, on the one hand, the idea of “death” as necrotic state, as passive stasis, an “earlier” state of things where we all “eventually” end back up (ashes to ashes, womb to tomb), and, on the other hand, the idea of “death” as an eternally destructive, “reicidal” force that actively negates all things (I take the word “reicide” from “reify,” from the Latin res, for “thing”) but just keeps going and going because it’s always already “nothing” itself and negates everything but itself. Death in the latter sense is actually quite lively: it apparently “lives” forever. This “death” can never ever die, which is why we rarely personify “Death” as unlucky stiff or motionless cadaver: we imagine “Death” (with a capital D) as the grimly active reaper, never one of the grimly reaped.

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Now, we might desire to grimly read the difference between death and death drive, between being dead and being death, as the difference between an “earlier state of things” and our active (albeit unconscious) desire to return to that “state.” Or, to put the death/death drive difference in somewhat more “literary” terms, we might think of it as the distinction between “lying in state” and lying through our teeth. We might read the desire to return to an “earlier state of things” as a desire to return to the real, to the “not-as-if of things” that all run together, a desire to dissolve that isolated and desiccated residue called “the self ” back into the greater “sea of yolky enjoyment” (Žižek 1992: 40) that we fondly remember as lost oceanic feeling. But the law of language can only ever tear us away from real dissolution; the law can only ever say “no, not really” to the yolky enjoyment of the not-as-if of things. Real death—not the active death drive but the passive state of dissolution—would be the only conceivable result of language’s becoming really real, of its no longer lying, of its ceasing to be fictional and fatally merging with the real. Stirred to the only life it knows by its no to the real, language can stay alive only by keeping the real at a distance, maintaining its actively destructive stance towards the thing. “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you.” Such “reicidal” labor—the very work of antiphysis—is the ludic, liberatory practice of creativity, the transformative “fiction writing,” that makes and keeps all human reality (all too dishonestly) human. Let’s remember, though, that, in the interpretation of desire being pushed here, it is not language per se but language’s specific and “vitally mortifying” fictiveness that allows us to conflate it with symbolic desire and the death drive, that arguably sets it (and us) apart from natural need, corporeal demand, animal instinct, or any merely “biologically determined” method of “communication” between physical bodies (those of “the birds and the bees,” for example). As we learned in the previous lesson, language is constitutively fictional both at the level of the solitary word and in the sequential or “narrative” dimension of the sentence. At the level of the word, language is fictional because of the word’s necessary separation from and negation of the thing. Literally, the word both lacks and kills the thing. This linguistic “reicide” is what leads Lacan to refer to words as “lethal symbols” (1966d/2006:249), what compels him to comment upon “the profound relationship uniting the notion of the death instinct to the problems of speech” (1966d/2006:260), what causes him to insist both that “the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and [that] this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (1966d/2006:262). Taken literally, however, desire tends to be perpetuated mainly in the form of sentences, seldom in random strings of murderous words but more typically in grammatically organized and syntactically ordered patterns of

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meaning that are, again, arguably narrative in structure. As suggested in the previous lesson, every completely predicated, grammatically correct sentence “tells a story,” narrates an action, features a beginning, middle, and end, and so on. But insofar as they do participate in narrative, sentences also implicate themselves in the death drive, for, like the beginning of any well-told story, the beginning of any minimally well-crafted sentence presupposes its ending and literally provokes a reader’s desire for closure, her desire for “the end.” According to this interpretation of desire, we “readers” at a very basic level want the same “thing” from our sentences, our stories, and our lives: that by the time we reach their and our conclusions, they and we will have, like, “totally” meant something.12 But believe it or not, this notion that we all desire to obtain a satisfying sense of “totality” or “completion” from syntactical, narrative, and autobiographical “closure” is what finally connects “the problems of speech” to the problem of . . .

III: “sex” If taking desire “literally” means anything at all, it means interpreting language and sex as the same knotty problem: to take desire literally means to read all language as “sexual” and all human sexuality—the avian and the apian won’t count for much in this discussion—as linguistically rather than biologically determined. As befits an argument based on linguistic determinism, what justifies this theory of linguistic sex qua sexual linguistics is neither empirical research involving microscopic investigation of physical, chromosomal evidence nor exhaustive ethnographic research quizzing every child, woman, and man in the history of the world about the minute particulars of their actual “sex lives.” Rather, what justifies the assertion that human sex is (and has always been) a problem of speech, and that speech itself is (and has always been) a sexual dilemma, is the purely etymological “fact” that the English word “sex” comes from the Latin secare, meaning “to cut.” Because the word “sex” shares its root, so to speak, with other “cutting” words (scission, scissoring, sectioning), the “meaning of sex” can be said to involve nothing but “coming to terms” with “the cut” of materialist language, in which not just “sex” or

12

This interpretation was first and most famously developed by Peter Brooks in the essay “Freud’s Master Plot,” in which Brooks employs Beyond the Pleasure Principle to conflate our desire for narrative closure with the death drive. You can read Brooks’ essay from start to finish in Adventures in Theory (191–206).

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“scissors” but all words in all languages are (strictly speaking) serrated.13 For here the sexual “cut” is to be read as nothing but the “no to the real” that initiates (us into) the symbolic order, tearing us away from the here and now, turning our oceanic world of runny things into a more sharply defined world of articulated phrases, routing our polymorphous perversity through the defiles of unimorphous normality, and so on.14 Just as Marx alerts us to the fact that “to be radical means to grasp things by the root” (1844/1978: 60), so a radically linguistic account of human sexuality holds that language cuts us off at the natural root, scissors or sections us away from the real, tears us a new hole—castrates, so to speak, every one of us who manages to speak, regardless of any merely anatomical origin or destiny.15 While actual castration in the “anatomically correct” sense would make it impossible for some people to really “have (a) sex,” symbolic castration— always articulated, never anatomical—is for Lacan the very condition of possibility of “sex” of any kind for everybody—yes, everybody. For if we can hazard to describe human sexuality in the universal terms of a desire for some form of erotic merger, union, or more-or-less lubricated fleshy friction between one desiring/desired body and some other(s), then this tenuous

13

14

15

Of course, not “all languages” derive from Latin, nor is it likely that the word for “sex” in each and every language in the history of the world derives or derived from some primordial word for “cut.” But these “historicist” objections are actually quite immaterial to the properly “structuralist” argument that antiphysis, this reicidal “cut” or lacerating “no to the real” that I’ve been yammering about in these lessons, is not simply a “secondary characteristic” of one or more languages but is rather the condition of possibility for human language (and human sexuality) as such. Freud characterizes infantile sexuality as polymorphously perverse, which means that for the infant erotogenic stimulation comes from many different sources and that its various component drives are not yet fixed in relation to any orifice or object. For Freud, the infant’s polymorphous perverse disposition entails an original bisexuality and is part of what the child loses (or is strongly encouraged to leave behind) when subjected to the social prohibitions that produce “unimorphously normal” orifice and/or object-choices. Gayle Rubin thus writes that “Psychoanalysis contains a unique set of concepts for understanding men, women, and sexuality. It is a theory of sexuality in human society. Most important, psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed, of how bisexual, androgynous infants are transformed into boys and girls” (Adventures: 166). Toril Moi ends her essay “Is Anatomy Destiny?: Freud and Biological Determinism” with this observation: “psychoanalysis is a form of thought that attempts to understand the psychological consequences of three universal traumas: the fact that there are Others, the fact of sexual difference, and the fact of death. Freud might have said that it is our destiny to have to find a way to coexist with others, to have to take up a position in relation to sexual difference, and to face death. To say so is not evidence of biological or any other kind of determinism” (2000: 88). I would add that Lacan might have said that language is the universal condition of possibility for all three of these “universal traumas,” that language is our specifically human way of coexisting with others, of taking up positions in relation to sexual difference, and even of facing up to death.

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description presupposes a division between such “bodies and pleasures,” however infinitely varied they all might be (for if there were no division, no separation, there would be no desire to speak of). Human sexual desire thus presupposes a certain incompletion or “missingness”; it presupposes our being “cut off ” from others with whom we were “originally” merged, from others to whom, mythically or umbilically, we were “originally” attached— others back into whom we would like ourselves to melt, others up against whom we might like to rub ourselves or some part of ourselves again (and again).16 In other words, in contrast to animal instinct, human sexual desire presupposes a sort of “personological” discontinuity with the totality of “things [that] at first run together in the hic et nunc of the all” (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229); it presupposes a radical separation not only from designated “others” but, back behind them, and more primordially, from that anonymous “sea of yolky enjoyment” that both “resists symbolization absolutely” (Lacan 1975/1991: 66) and saturates our earliest experience-ofourselves-as-everything (a.k.a. “primary narcissism”) in the undifferentiated real. Note that in this interpretation of desire Eros and Thanatos are disturbingly indistinguishable. The two become “as one,” so to speak, insofar as both the erotic and the thanatical can be imagined as a single drive, “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things” (Freud 1920/1989: 612). Just as all desire, regardless of particular object or orifice, is structurally suicidal, always urging self-cancellation, so, as Lacan comments, “every drive is virtually a death drive” (1966h/2006: 719). This interpretation of desire thus couples the idea that “ ‘the aim of all life is death’ ” with the notion that the aim

16

In one of the richer moments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud turns to “myth rather than . . . scientific explanation” to trace “the origin of an instinct to a need to restore an earlier state of things” (1920/1989: 622). After having dwelt at tedious length on the topic of germ-cell division, Freud abruptly trots out “the theory which Plato put into the mouth of Aristophanes in the Symposium, and which deals not only with the origin of the sexual instinct but also with the most important of its variations in relation to its object. ‘The original human nature was not like the present, but different. In the first place, the sexes were originally three in number, not two as they are now; there was man, woman, and the union of the two . . . .’ Everything about these primaeval men was double: they had four hands and four feet, two faces, two privy parts, and so on. Eventually Zeus decided to cut these men in two . . . After the division had been made, ‘the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one’ ” (1920/1989: 622–3). Note how in this myth whoever is subjected to the sexual drive desires to return to a state before Zeus made “the cut.” Note also how neatly the myth accounts for variations in regard to sexual object—accounts, that is, for male and female homosexuality and heterosexuality: for we could and should read the three sexes in the mythic time “before the cut” not simply as “man, woman, and the union of the two,” but as man-man, woman-woman, and man-woman.

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of all sex is jouissance.17 In this interpretation, both Eros and Thanatos aim to dissolve themselves into their “others.” Both desire to erase the boundary that separates each into its own discontinuous confines. But what if this boundary demarcating “the limits of the human” person were initially nothing but the “no to the real,” the no to non-differentiation, that first installs any speaking subject into the symbolic order? If “the moment at which desire is humanized is also that at which the child is born into language” (Lacan 1966d/2006:262), then the initiating law of language dictates that words must be separated from real things in order to symbolize them, that signifiers must be divided from signifieds in order to join together and become signs. This law decrees that the very letters comprising signs must be separated from each other, must not occupy the same space at the same time, so that each individual letter might be “more productively” organized and combined with other letters in properly spaced, grammatically correct, normatively sequential and thus socially consequential ways. In this “legal” interpretation of human desire—in which all merely “animal instinct” is always already trumped by a “law” that was never simply “of the jungle”—language structures and enforces the anthropogenetic social norms that make all versions of human reality everywhere possible. For Lacan, however, the most rudimentary law and most constitutively social norm that language enforces is the “paternal prohibition” against incest. As we rehearsed in the preceding lesson, the “no to the real” that separates words from things is for Lacan structurally analogous to the “Oedipal” law that separates moms from their spawn. Just as a word cannot immediately merge with the real thing that it names but must “wait” to be combined with other words in order to form a grammatically correct and complete sentence, so the child cannot “merge” with its real mother as illicitly desired sexual object but must wait to grow up in order to be legally “combined” with some more appropriate “other” in a institutionally sanctioned matrimonial alliance. Intimately bonding syntax to kinship, Lacan marries the syntactical rules that establish which linguistic combinations are permitted and which are proscribed to the sexual regulations that establish which erotic combinations are legally recognized or

17

Jouissance is a “French term derived from the verb jouir,” to enjoy, to play—and to come. Jouissance “denotes an extreme form of pleasure: ecstatic or orgasmic bliss that transcends or shatters one’s everyday experience of the world” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 211). Jouissance thus relates to la petite mort, or “the little death,” as certain French writers have been known to refer to self-shattering orgasm. If jouissance dissolves the boundaries between Eros and Thanatos, it might also involve blurring the line between ecstasy and trauma. For a much more generous unpacking of the term, see Charles Shepherdson’s entry in the BHLCT (2019: 540–1).

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encouraged and which are abominated, reviled, or (in some cultures even capitally) punished.18 As Lacan insists: The primordial Law is . . . the Law which, in regulating marriage ties, superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature . . . The prohibition against incest is merely the subjective pivot of that Law . . . This law, then, reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order [i.e., a “symbolic order”—CT]. For without names for kinship relations, no power can institute the order of preferences and taboos that knot and braid the thread of lineage through the generations. And it is the confusion of generations which, in the Bible as in all traditional laws, is cursed as being the abomination of the Word and the desolation of the sinner. (Lacan 1966d/2006: 229–30)19

18

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In 2010, for example, the government of Uganda, after hosting a series of anti-queer talks by visiting American “evangelicals,” got to work proposing “a bill to impose a death sentence on homosexuality” (see “After U.S. Evangelicals Visit, Uganda Considers Death for Gays,” The New York Times, January 4, 2010, A1). In 2011, however, “after receiving overwhelming criticism from across the globe, Uganda’s Parliament . . . let the time expire on a contentious anti-homosexuality bill that had threatened this East African country’s international standing. The Anti-Homosexuality Bill sought to impose the death penalty for a number of reasons, including being a ‘serial offender’ of the ‘offense of homosexuality.’ The bill also called for Ugandans to alert the government to known cases of homosexual behavior within 24 hours. Religious leaders said they had obtained more than two million signatures in support of the measure” (“Antigay Bill in Uganda is Shelved in Parliament,” The New York Times, May 14, 2011, A4). Update: Homophobic and anti-trans evangelical conservatives in the U.S. are no longer having to go to Uganda to launch legislation against LGBTQ lives. Though as far as I know none of the 200+ bills currently being considered and passed in numerous “red state” legislatures across America explicitly call for the death penalty, as did the bill in Uganda, the general purpose of all the legislation is to make life difficult, miserable, or impossible for all LGBTQ people, but particularly queer youth, who are most vulnerable to suicide. So it isn’t really that much of a stretch to call these legislations lethal and to say that people will suffer and die because of them. For more on crackdowns on LGBTQ freedoms in authoritarian states—Russia, Ghana, and Florida—see Hopkins (2022), Asiedu (2022), and Ghorayshi (2022), respectively. Please review the footnote on “primordial discord” in Lesson Two for a stronger understanding of what Lacan’s up to in this passage. For it’s crucial to grasp how the “primordial discord” of the “primal horde” precipitated what Lacan here calls “the primordial Law” against incest and to see how Lacan thinks that law relates to the institution of a “language order” that operates as an order to use language, the order to “use your words”— in other words, the “paternal” imperative to symbolize, “to mean.” For what Lacan means when he here writes that “without names for kinship relations no power can institute [any] order of preferences or taboos,” etc., is not simply that a word like “mother” names a “prohibited” sexual object—he’s suggesting that the very name “mother” is the prohibition itself, or that the prohibition (the primordial “no to the real” that we’ve been discussing throughout) is itself the condition of possibility of that or any other name, that “without names” there couldn’t be laws or prohibitions or kinship systems or civilizations, just “hordes” who can only physically tear themselves apart because they can’t antiphysically tell themselves apart. For more on Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and the “elementary structures of kinship” from a feminist perspective, see Rubin (1975/2007: 1664–82); Adventures (149–89).

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But outside of the fact that some infractions of the sexual laws of a given society are punishable by execution of the desolate “sinner,” how might these syntactical/sexual analogies relate to the death drive? As it turns out, they are quite intimately related, for, in a sense, all three (Eros, Logos, and Thanatos) involve our old friend—perhaps our oldest friend—antiphysis; all three involve the initial and ongoing separation from the real “reign of nature” that is human reality’s “cultural” condition of possibility; all three intimately involve the social question of the various ways in which we must psychically deal with this physical separation. Let’s pause to consider this intimate involvement in the light of the distinction between the physically impossible and the socially prohibited. As we learned in the preceding lesson, it is physically impossible for the word “elephant” ever to be an elephant, or for the word “moonlight” ever to be moonlight. Analogously, it is physically impossible for “the little animal produced by the union of a man and a woman” to “unproduce” itself back into that woman, to disappear up into its mother’s womb, to physically re-occupy that “real place” with the entirety of its miraculously re-fetalized body (umbilicus reattached, placenta stuffed back in to boot, all needs met before they can even be experienced as needs, much less turned into demand or desire, and so on). Both of these “mergers” (word with thing, tot with mom) are physically impossible, not just socially prohibited: in other words, there’s no “law” imposed from elsewhere the “repeal” of which could allow these events to transpire. Ontheotherhanditisphysicallypossibleforanexperimentalwritertounseparate wordsandlettersandtoomitpunctuationaltogetherandyetstillhavewrittensome thingmoreorlessreadablealbeitnotwithoutsomedifficulty. It is even physically possible, in some graphic media, to “do away” altogether with the spaces separating individual letters (like, say, the letters i, n, k, s, t, a, i, & n), so that they all can be made to occupy the same space at the same time. Nothing physically prevents any writer who so desires from taking pen and paper and “experimentally” superimposing in a single space all the letters in an independent clause—such as, for example, “the word for ink-stain is inkstain”—thus breaking the “law” that “says” that, to end up having been meaningful, individual letters “must” be divided from each other and arranged and combined in particular and permissible sequences. Such a real merger is prohibited (by the symbolic order) but not impossible. Our “experimental writer” will have really taken these letters down, transgressively merging one with another, aggressively destroying the discrete individuality of each; s/he will have really negated the prohibitory “no to the real,” the no to “sexual” undifferentiation, that makes “normal” human reality possible. But the end result of this scoff-law experimental writing will be only a real but

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unreadable stain, a dark spot of abjection, a traumatic/ecstatic blotch marking the “place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1982:2). In other words, our experimental writer’s “ink-stain” will have achieved being a real ink-stain but only at the expense of ever legibly meaning “ink-stain” or anything else at all. Analogously to this botched experiment in transgressive writing: it is quite possible to really break the law against incest and actually “return to the mother’s womb” by having honest-to-god sexual intercourse with said mother, whether “wittingly” or not.20 The trouble here, however, is that our “wits” are constituted in such a way—through socio-normative regulations and prohibitions—that to really and wittingly have sex with our own mothers could very well cause us to lose them (our wits, that is). If the very structural coherence of consciousness is established through being made to mean, through an ordered separation from or loss of the real, then to lose the loss of the real and re-merge with it could mean to lose ourselves, lose our meanings, lose our minds. In other words, overcoming the social prohibition against incest, negating this particular form of the prohibitory “no to nondifferentiation” that initiates human reality, may very well be physically possible, but it may not be psychically viable. Now, since the adjective “viable” relates to life and the livable—the word literally means “capable of living outside the uterus”—what the preceding examples suggest is that neither experimental ink-stain nor accomplished incest can be a viable subjective or “authorial” enterprise. Literally speaking, one might say that both spell death, the collapse of conventional meaning. In other words,“incest” might be read as a name for “the place where meaning collapses,” but insofar as the word “incest” itself remains a legible name for that unspeakable stain, a “lethal symbol” that can be used to murder that murderously meaningless “place” from a distance, the word “incest” is not that place, says no to the “primal scene” of undifferentiation.21 In other words, the word “incest” can mean incest, can designate whatever incestuous desire we might unconsciously harbor, but the word “incest” can never finally be incest—and we have nothing but the “sexual” cut of the symbolic order to thank for that. 20

21

Oedipus was unwittingly incestuous, had no clue that Jocasta was his mum when he was once again inside her. Nor does Hamlet seem to know what he’s asking with the line “How stand I, then, that have a father kill’d, a mother stained?” (IV.iv.58-59). Ambiguously mixing possession with commission, this line is usually taken as the clincher for the Oedipal interpretation of the play, for though Hamlet is consciously stating the obvious— that he has a father who has been killed (poisoned, by Claudius) and a mother who has been “stained” (inseminated, by Claudius)—Hamlet inadvertently owns that he himself has done the killing/staining in his unconscious. Normally in Freud’s discourse the phrase “primal scene” refers to the real or imagined observation of one’s parents having sex. I am misusing the term here by letting it represent the image of one’s having sex with one’s parent.

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But let’s flesh these analogies out a bit by considering a few pieces of fiction that thematize incest as symbolic death-match, watery silence, structural collapse, and so on. At the end of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, Roderick Usher’s “eroto-thanatical” tussle with his own freshly “unencrypted” sister precipitates the crumbling collapse of his “House” (a gothic mansion of a metaphor for both his psyche and the Usher “family line”): at the moment of narrative climax, the whole show fissures and falls back into the miasmic “tarn” from which it seems to have emerged. In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the suicidal Quentin Compson— obsessed with temporality, mortality, and thoughts of having sex (or of claiming to have had sex) with his sister Caddy—takes a little time before drowning himself in the Charles River to think “If I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother” (1929/1984:197). But if I were to rewrite Quentin’s line to let it support the interpretation of desire being developed here, I would have him think instead: “If I’d just really had mother, I never would’ve had to say Mother, not even once.” For if Lacan is correct to say that the prohibition against incest “reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order,” then it’s the fact that Quentin has to say “Mother”—is ordered to symbolize Mother, to put her and everything else into words, to “matri-reicidally” mean her rather than uninterruptedly be with her—that keeps him from ever “really” having “had” her in the first place. If he had never been separated from that “first place,” he wouldn’t have to think about tossing himself into the body of water that finally substitutes for it. If he had just had Mother, had never been expelled from the oceanic/maternal real, he wouldn’t have had to say Mother or anything else at all. But of course the symbolic order insists that we all do “have to say.” Even if we don’t all get to have our say (because some of us get silenced), “our say” is, in this interpretation of desire, all we ever really get to have, all we ever really get to be. The linguistic “limits of the human” ensure that we never really get to be but must always be made to mean.22 It is nothing other than the radical unavailability of being to meaning that guarantees that desire must

22

You don’t mean a thing if you’re not not a thing: Here’s as good a place as any to point out that the inverse of this assertion—“we” never really get to be but always be made to mean— is that some of us want to mean but are forced instead to be. Such is Fanon’s point when he opens “The Fact of Blackness” with the lines “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” Fanon speaks to what it means to be “sealed into [a] crushing objecthood” (Adventures 67). He understands that he can’t “mean a thing” if he’s not not a thing, but that as a Black man a “thing” is all he can ever be, all he can ever be defined as, in an anti-black world whose meanings are dominated by, whose definitions are owned by, the myrmidons of colonialism.

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be taken literally. As whorish as it all may seem to Prince Hamlet, this interpretation of desire tells us why we can only ever unpack our hearts with words.

IV: “and interpretation” Now, I keep unpacking my theoretical heart with the words “in this interpretation of desire” because, in this interpretation of desire, “desire, in fact, is interpretation itself ” (Lacan 1973/1981: 176). In fact, my own heart’s desire at this juncture is nothing but to marry Lacan’s matter-of-fact statement about desire’s being “interpretation itself ” to Nietzsche’s radical claim that there are no facts, only interpretations.23 In other words, the “fact” that I have been giving this account of desire in a language that is by nature fictional means that what I am offering here is not “the truth” about desire but “merely” an interpretation. And yet, as Nietzsche would have it, any competing set of truth-claims about desire can’t finally amount to anything more or other than interpretation, either. For in this interpretation there is no empirical, objective, or absolute “truth” about desire or about anything else in human reality to be had; there is only ever a potentially infinite set of competing, more or less engaging, more or less lively—but never anything other than perspectival— interpretations. Of course, it may come as no surprise to read that what you’re reading here purports to be nothing more than an interpretation, given from a particular perspective, and not an objective report on absolutely axiomatic conditions. But if reading this stale news leaves you unsatisfied, wanting more—not because you want fresher revelations but because you are at heart a reader who hungers after timeless truth and aren’t likely to be content with “trendy” artifice—then you may already have an unconscious sense of what links interpretation to desire (and hence to sex and death). For what, one might ask, is “interpretation itself ” if not the revelation of a certain emptiness, the presence of the absence of certainty or finality, the limning of one’s lack of some satisfyingly conclusive explanation? And what would we want “the truth” to be if not the final answer to all our interpretive prayers, the

23

In The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes: “Against positivism, which halts at phenomena— ‘There are only facts’—I would say: No, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact ‘in itself ’— perhaps it is folly to want to do such a thing . . . In so far as the word ‘knowledge’ means anything, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no [single] meaning behind it, but countless meanings.’ (1901/1968: 267).

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explanation to end all explanations, the “absolute knowledge” that would bring the restless activity of interpreting to its final destination? But here our “prayers” can pretty much be damned: for in “the end” our actively “interpreting the text” of human reality must presuppose that some firm and final knowledge of its significance will always remain missing. The phrase “interpreting the text” of course implies our wanting to know “the truth” about it, wanting to know exactly “what it all means.” But what does “wanting to know” mean except not knowing? And what would knowing “the truth” or the “total meaning” of anything mean if not being in a state of no longer wanting to know, no longer desiring, no longer interpreting, no longer restlessly reading? Paradoxically, then, Roland Barthes knew exactly what he was talking about when he wrote that “literature is the question minus the answer.” What do things signify, what does the world signify? All literature is this question . . . but it is this question minus its answer. No literature in the world has ever answered the question it asked, and it is this very suspension which has always constituted it as literature. (1964/1972: 202).

And because Barthes is, ironically enough, perfectly correct—“literature” is the right answer to the question of the missing right answer—literary interpretation might be read as the very “restlessness” of the active death drive itself. On the other hand, such articles of faith or kisses of death as “the answer,” “firm knowledge,” “unshakeable belief ” in “absolute truth,” etc., could be considered the anti-literary tropes par excellence, representing the necrotic “state of things” that interpretation may think it desires to restore (since interpretation ostensibly “wants to know,” wants to have knowledge) but which interpretation may more “literally” want to defer. In other words, active interpretation ceaselessly puts off possessing the knowledge it supposedly wants to have because the vital process of interpretation ends, cancels itself out, when its “revelation of emptiness” fills itself up (with the rich chocolatey goodness of satisfying “truth”); interpretation dies when the restless negativity of being death settles into the pure positivity of being dead certain, being dead right. In a literally literary interpretation of desire, then, desire desires only desire, not absolute knowledge; interpretation interprets only interpretation, minus final answers, minus any eternal truth. Now, I have written the words “literary interpretation” above as if there were some other kind. But if we buy Derrida’s interpretation that “fictional” language has “invaded the universal problematic” and everything become “discourse” (1966/1978: 280), if we subscribe to Lacan’s interpretation that all

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human “desire must be taken literally” and that “desire, in fact, is interpretation itself ” (1964/1978: 176), then might we not also want to submit ourselves to the interpretation that all interpretation is literary, fabricative, creative writing? If the beating heart of any interpretation must be unpacked with words, expressed in language that is by nature fictional, then might not “interpretation” be most richly interpreted as an aesthetic rather than veridical or moral phenomenon, a strong exercise in the art of the sentence emerging from a strong aversion to any final honest-to-god “truth”? Interpretation, in this radically Nietzschean interpretation, wouldn’t desire the intuition of “truth” or the acquisition of “knowledge”; it wouldn’t want answers at all but rather the strength to live without final answers so as to proliferate more engaging fictions about fiction in a world that must be made to mean. I call this interpretation Nietzschean because, as we first saw in the Preface, it was Nietzsche’s radical claim that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58). Well before Freud or Lacan got around to it, it was Nietzsche who first interpreted interpretations as matters of life and death (drives), as particularly dense transfer points for libidinal energy and relations of power. It was Nietzsche who first framed the arts of interpretation as perversely erotic, even sadomasochistic, but in any event always richly aesthetic endeavors, and it was Nietzsche who correspondingly considered the “will to truth” as an austere and impoverishing form of priestly asceticism, a pacifying renunciation of interpretation grounded in a rancorous hostility to sensuality, to art, to sex, to violence, to “life” itself. Perhaps the first philosopher wise enough to love fiction more than “wisdom,” it was Nietzsche who first desired to call the value of “truth” into question and who first connected the epistemological drive, the “will to truth,” to the “will to death.”24 For Nietzsche, there is neither “absolute truth” nor “divine will,” only competing and “all too human” interpretations. All interpretations are humanly “embodied,” situated in individual perspectives, and all perspectives are contingent upon, and determined by, the relative strength or weakness of the interpreter’s “will to power” or “instinct for freedom.” The relative strength

24

In Book V of The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that the “will to truth . . . might be a concealed will to death” (1887/2006: 364); in Genealogy of Morals, he writes that truthdriven ascetic idealism entails the “renunciation of any interpretation (of forcing, adjusting, shortening, omitting, filling-out, inventing, falsifying and everything else essential to interpretation),” and that “on the whole, this [renunciation of interpretation] expresses the asceticism of virtue just as well as any denial of sensuality (it is basically just a modus of this denial). However, the compulsion towards it, that unconditional will to truth, is faith in the ascetic ideal itself, even if as an unconscious imperative” (1887/2006: 431).

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or weakness of any interpreter’s “will” depends in turn upon the type of “instinct for freedom” it expresses in relation to “life” interpreted as perpetual change or becoming, as a (not exactly painless) process of self-transformation— the ecstatic, self-shattering, “Dionysian” reality of creatively human suffering. Nietzsche, that is, pretty much endorses the Buddha’s first “noble truth,” that “life is painful,” but he veers away from Buddhism or any other “world religion” in terms of the question of what to do with or about the pain. For Nietzsche, strong interpretation not only “takes the pain” but eagerly uses it to express itself as the instinct for freedom for “life” as perpetual becoming, while weak interpretation flees the pain, flinchingly expresses an instinct for freedom from “life,” conducts itself as a “spiritual retreat” into hypostasized being. A strong or “noble” interpretation “masochistically” enjoys the pain of vital self-transformation, finds a constitutively aesthetic “happiness in great tension” (1886/2006: 356); a weak or “slavish” or “herd” interpretation, on the other hand, finds its “promise of happiness” only anesthetically, in conventional “truth” or the congregationally “fixed idea” (1887/2006: 396) and in whatever “slackening of tension” (1887/1992: 474) such “fixings” can provide. Rather obnoxiously, Nietzsche frequently depicts the difference between “noble” and “slave” moralities, between strong and weak modes of interpretation, in explicitly gendered, racialized, or nationalized terms— terms all too easily appropriated by all sorts of fascist goon squads.25 More interestingly and productively, however, Nietzsche, anticipating Freud, also suggests that this “prepositional” conflict of interpretive wills—desiring freedom for life vs. desiring freedom from it—can obtain within a single individual’s psyche.26 Now, the idea that a mode of interpretation can be grounded in an instinctual desire for “freedom from life” allows Nietzsche to link a certain type of interpretative “will” to the death drive. But Nietzsche also appreciates the difference between death drive and death itself; he understands the difference between active and passive annihilation. Nietzsche thus posits that although the “will to truth . . . might be a concealed will to death” (1887/2006: 364), even the weakest will in the world “still prefers to will nothingness than not will” (1887/2006: 435). In other words, though interpretive desire may

25

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As I suggested in the Preface, though Nietzsche’s thoughts have indeed been taken up by both new and old-school fascists, Nietzsche himself would never have sported a swastika, nor donned a white hood, nor worn a red MAGA hat. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes “There are master moralities and slave moralities. I would add at once that in all higher and more complex cultures, there are also apparent attempts to mediate between the two moralities, and even more often a confusion of the two and a mutual misunderstanding, indeed sometimes even their violent juxtaposition—even in the same person, within one single breast” (1886/2006: 356).

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desire to complete or “end itself ” as desire, it also desires to perpetuate itself as interpretive desire, as the continuing revelation of emptiness, as an ongoing “reference to Nothingness” (Žižek 1999/2008: 126), an indefinitely literal and literary suspension. Little wonder, then, if, after Nietzsche, the “essential incompleteness of interpretation” becomes one of the most prominent “postulates of modern hermeneutics,” as Michel Foucault writes in the essay “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.”27 Foucault suggests that in Nietzsche’s work in particular “it is clear that interpretation is always incomplete.” What is philosophy for him if not a kind of philology continually in suspension, a philology without end, always farther unrolled, a philology that would never be absolutely fixed? Why? As he says in Beyond Good and Evil, it is because “to perish from absolute knowledge could well form part of the basis of being.” (Foucault 1967/1998: 275; Adventures: 94)

In Foucault’s strongly Nietzschean interpretation, any strongly Nietzschean interpretation refuses to fix meaning or be fixed by it; such an interpretation declines “to perish from absolute knowledge.” Rather, interpretation in the Nietzschean mode suspends and sustains itself, persists in perpetually becoming rather than finally or completely being (itself), and it pulls off this hat-trick of modern hermeneutics by reveling in language’s vital but brutal fictionality. In Foucault’s “violent” interpretation of Nietzschean violence: Interpretation can never be completed . . . quite simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, for after all everything is already interpretation, each sign is in itself not the thing that offers itself to interpretation but an interpretation of other signs . . . so that it is as much a relationship of violence as of elucidation that is established in interpretation. Indeed, interpretation does not clarify a matter to be interpreted, which offers itself passively; it can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer. (1967/1998: 275; Adventures: 95).

Interpretation “with a hammer” enacts its “will to power” against certainty, against the fixity of non-fiction, against the self-cancellation of desire, against 27

Hermeneutics is generally understood as “the study of understanding” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 201), is generally interpreted as “the theory of interpretation in general” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 132).

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reification, positivism, or any absolute truth. This interpretive desire expresses—and always in a language that is by nature fictional, always in words that negate real things, always in symbols that are reicidally “lethal” (Lacan 1966d/2006:249)—an instinct for freedom for rather than from “life”: The death of interpretation is to believe that there are signs, signs that exist primarily, originally, actually, as coherent, pertinent, and systematic marks. The life of interpretation, on the contrary, is to believe that there are only interpretations. (Foucault 1967/1998: 278; Adventures: 97).

In the end, then, taking desire “literally” indeed requires a suspension— not of disbelief, but of belief itself. For if taking desire literally requires “believing” that there are, originally and ultimately, only all-too-human interpretations, it also requires believing that this very belief is “only” an interpretation as well. But while this interpretation of interpretation is, no doubt, radically atheistic, it is not an expression of so-called “nihilism”; rather, believe it or not (and if you’re trained to believe that atheism equals nihilism, then you’ll probably not), radically incredulous interpretation maintains itself as a way of overcoming nihilism, as a way of saying yes to “life”—or at least to what Nietzsche calls “everything strange, unusual, and questionable” (1887/2006: 368) in the interpretive experience of life.28 For Nietzsche, and for Foucault, the “death of interpretation” (and hence of desire) would indeed be the wages of believing “in the absolute existence of signs” (1967/1998: 278; Adventures: 97), of believing that such signs can actually ground objective knowledge, faithfully represent absolute truth, finally decipher the real’s big secret, and so on. This faith in some firm and final significance, in what Derrida calls “the transcendental signified” (1966/1978:280), expresses a weak-ass interpretation that completely “abandons the violence, the incompleteness, the infinity of interpretations” (1967/1998: 275; Adventures: 97). Faith in the “transcendental signified” signifies a spiritual retreat from “life”—it enacts or “wills” a veritable “freedom from life.” But the “life” of “godless” interpretative desire, as the perpetual revelation of human (and cosmic) emptiness, as the ongoing reference to our own nothingness, the perpetual presence of the absence of the answer—as, in other words, 28

Overcoming nihilism for Nietzsche means getting over the “death of God,” getting over “monotonotheism,” getting over one’s disappointment and hurt feelings that an interpretation turned out not to be the one: “One interpretation has collapsed, but because it was considered the interpretation, it appears as though there is no sense in existence whatsoever, as though everything is in vain” (1887/2006: 386). For Nietzsche, our overcoming nihilism and affirming life mean our allowing “the world [to] become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations (1887/2006: 379).

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literature—involves affirming that signs only ever signify more and other signs. In this interpretation, saying “yes” to this “life” (or to Martin Hägglund’s This Life) means nothing but affirming that “everything is [always] already interpretation” (1967/1998: 275; Adventures: 95). Ultimately, then, taking desire literally involves affirming human reality as a montage of the imaginary and the symbolic, as a rich tapestry of ambiguous and conflictual fictions—suspended over the void. To affirm (rather than bemoan) this “empty” or “aesthetic” reality means learning, with Nietzsche and other bad company, to savor the unsettling of sedimented ways of making sense of the world, to affirm that it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon [that] existence and the world [are] justified” (Nietzsche 1872/2006: 58). Such affirmation involves refusing the comforts of fixed meaning, swearing off absolute knowledge, swearing to tell anything but “the truth,” lying with a good conscience, even dancing at the edge of the abyss. It involves nothing less and nothing more—and, for Nietzsche, nothing more becoming of a “free spirit”—than affirming “life as literature.”29 But as we’ll see, taking desire literally also involves affirming or asserting oneself as literature, accepting one’s own “textual anthropogenesis,” reveling, so to speak, in the revelation of one’s own emptiness, the referential nothingness of subjective desire. Not that there’s anything particularly selfassuring or ego-boosting about such “self-relating negativity” (Žižek 2006:64). Indeed, affirming one’s own lack, one’s textual condition or symbolic castration, may take a sort of existential courage, a willingness to put the self at risk, if only by virtue of not being absolutely cocksure about identity, not taking one’s own or anyone else’s dead-seriously. Perhaps taking desire literally requires taking all identity ironically, for both forms of “taking” require (to take some words from Julia Kristeva) that we “recognize ourselves as always already altered by the symbolic—by language”; both forms invite us to “hear in language that basic incompleteness that conditions the indefinite quest of signifying concatenations.” Taking desire literally, taking identity ironically, affirming “life as literature,” interpreting the self as text: all these determinedly linguistic endeavors finally add up to nothing but what Kristeva calls “joying in the truth of self-division” (1982: 89), engaging in the hard

29

In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche designates “art” as the realm “in which lying sanctifies itself and the will to deception has good conscience on its side” (1887/2006: 431–2). In Gay Science, Nietzsche writes that “one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the ‘will’ that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence” (1887/1974: 289–90). “Life as Literature” is the subtitle of an excellent book on Nietzsche by Richard Nehamas (1987).

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labor of antiphysis, the discursively violent art of self-transformation. As Foucault puts it in “The Minimalist Self ”: For me intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself . . . I know that knowledge can transform us, that truth is not only a way of deciphering the world (and maybe what we call truth doesn’t decipher anything) but that if I know the truth I will be changed . . . This transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is, I think, something rather close to the aesthetic experience. Why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting? (1983/1988: 14).

Or, to change the medium but not the self-divisive, self-shattering aesthetics of the experience in question, why should writers desire to write if “writing” weren’t interpreted “as the very possibility of change” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646)? All apologies to Acteon, but why would we ever find ourselves dying to write if we didn’t think we were going to be transformed, turned on and torn apart—literally—by our own writings?

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Four: symbolic castration, need/demand/desire, Eros/Thanatos, fort-da, polymorphous perversity, jouissance, primal scene, hermeneutics

Lesson Five

“You are not yourself ” —or, I (think, therefore I) is an other

I: Missing persons, bodies in pieces Unlike Jesus in the bumper-sticker slogan, theory doesn’t love you. Theoretical writing is of course keenly concerned with the social, psychic, and political processes of “forced humanization” that allow or compel you to become a “you” or me to become an “I.” But theoretical writers generally don’t believe in any real “you” or “I”; they don’t believe in any essential or abiding core of identity for any one of us, don’t believe that there’s some truly “true self ” trapped within, lurking behind, or floating above these socio-symbolic processes. “Anti-identitarian” theorists never claim that “we” don’t exist at all, you and I; rather, they argue that none of us ever manages to abide in the purely self-identical, fully self-present way that we might be pleased to think. Given our irreducibly linguistic and representational condition, given the universal lack that constitutes all of us in our particular being, we can never quite seamlessly coincide with ourselves; we are always “extimately” alienated “strangers to ourselves,” always more or less or in any case other than what we (might like to) think (of ourselves). But just so we’re clear: in this interpretation, it’s not as if anyone of us ever originally possessed some naturally “true self ” back in the day, some organic or “authentic” identity that we managed to lose through some blunder, trauma, or trespass, some historical misfortune, social injustice, or original sin, some essentially “real core of self ” that’s somehow been high-jacked by malign forces and that we might actually recover or recapture some bright dawn through therapy, prayer, meditation, heroic intellectual effort, divine intervention, spiritual retreat, or worker’s revolution. No, sorry, fat chance of help for one’s “true self ” from any of those redemptive quarters: in this interpretation “you are not yourself,” you’ve never really been yourself, and you’re never really going to be yourself, no matter what. So you might just as well get over it. Now this last piece of advice may seem cynically flippant, less sage than sour. For “alienation” generally counts as a genuinely human malaise, a source 97

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of considerable human suffering. And according to no less of a theoretical writer than Theodor Adorno, “the need to lend a voice to suffering is the condition of all truth” (1966/2007: 17–18). But, truth be told, this seemingly dispiriting counsel about our self-alienation—that maybe we should just get over it—might also be taken as well-intended, user-friendly, even generously meant. This “anti-identitarian” idea of constitutive and irreparable lack or “loss of self ” could even be taken as a sort of “glad tidings,” as an open invitation to throw off the burdens and constraints of consistent self-identity. In other words, the “ontological bad news” (Butler 1999: 198) that we’ll never really get to be ourselves, you and I, is offset by the more promising assurance that we don’t necessarily have to be ourselves either (given that there’s never been any “real self ” for any one of us to be). At the end of the day, theoretical identity-busters aren’t simply callous misanthropes indifferent to personal suffering or spiteful nihilists who think nothing valuable about anyone’s humanity has ever been damaged or denied through assault, addiction, objectification, state-sanctioned violence, terrorist attacks, alienated labor, religious intolerance, racial oppression, colonial subjugation, the predations of consumer capitalism, or any other indisputably real source of humanly caused human misery. Theorists just don’t think it’s some inherently “true self ” that gets banged up on these avenues of immiseration. And actually it’s often in the interest of protecting or enhancing our potential for selftransformation—for developing richer, suppler, maybe even more radically egalitarian modes of human agency, dignity, creativity, well-being, and freedom—that theoretical writers resist or reject the notion of the absolutely “true self.” For on this view there’s already been enough damage done to human life in the service of mandatory selfhood; there’s already been enough impoverishment of human reality in the name of compulsory identity; there’s already been enough anguish in the hot pursuit of “authenticity.”1 So while “the need to lend a voice to suffering” may well be “the condition of all truth,” as Adorno proclaims, the actual articulation of specifically theoretical “truth,” as Fredric Jameson insists, “must always be accompanied by the shock of defamiliarization and demystification, and of the revelation of repressed or forgotten realities” (Jameson 2006: 369). And the shocking revelations or rude awakenings that must always accompany radically theoretical truth-claims may very well come as pain-causing kicks in the

1

Later in this lesson we’ll see Foucault side with Nietzsche against Sartre on the question of “authenticity.” But here we’ll note that “authenticity” gets called on the carpet by BIPOC scholars as well. In Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong, Paul Chaat Smith quotes Henry Louis Gates, who in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man writes that “ ‘Authenticity’ is among the founding lies of the modern age” (2009: 88).

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pants for our reified common sense, our clarified understandings of our identity, our oldest and strongest feelings of familiarity with ourselves and our surroundings. Theoretical truth-tellers, then, demote or deride “the true self ” for a whole host of ethical, political, aesthetic, or even secularly “spiritual” reasons: because they discern ideology busily working behind the scenes of all “identitarian” imperatives, theoretical writers see liberatory potential in hatching new strategies for subverting, abusing, or otherwise defamiliarizing and demystifying “identity.” Theoretical writers, that is, suspect that it’s invariably some representative of the “regulatory regimes” of “the Political Father” that encourages you to “be yourself ” or commands you to “be all you can be” (to quote an old recruiting slogan for the United States Army); they suspect that it’s always some instrumental agent of the normalizing law that demands to see your dog-tags, your identity papers.2 So the question of whether and how successfully you can “play tag” with yourself and produce “your papers” before the law is always already political. But because the name-game of “identity politics” invariably involves the production of “papers” (or, in the broadest “cultural” sense, of writing, of inscribing and reinscribing ourselves into our various “documents of civilization”), the question of what it means to be (or not to be) “all you can be” is always already “literary” to boot.3 Our purpose in this lesson is to investigate why this is the 2

3

In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” Butler writes that “identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . the normalizing categories of oppressive structures” (1991/2007: 1707). In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes that “The text is . . . that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father” (1975: 53). But the patriarchal figure being mooned here is for Barthes not necessarily your own personal daddy but rather whoever or whatever attempts “to fix meaning.” Thus for Barthes the uninhibited text “liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law” (1968/1977: 147). With the phrase “documents of civilization” I’m tapping into the title sentence of our seventh lesson, Walter Benjamin’s truth-claim that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1950/1968: 256). As for the term cultural: in his essay on “Culture” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, Stephen Greenblatt characterizes culture as “a system of constraints” and describes cultivation as “the internalization and practice of a code of manners” (1995: 227). Noting that in literary studies the concept of culture is “closely allied” to that of ideology, Greenblatt writes that “the ensemble of beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits within which social behavior must be contained, a repertoire of models to which individuals must conform” (1995: 225). For Greenblatt, the use-value of “culture” for literary studies involves recognizing that “Western literature over a very long period of time has been one of the great institutions for the enforcement of cultural boundaries through praise and blame” (1995: 226). But speaking of enforcing (or transgressing) cultural boundaries, there’s that fraught term identity politics, which a variety of writers praise or blame for a variety of reasons. I use it here mainly to underscore the originally feminist-activist insight that “the personal is political,” which, as we’ll be seeing, pretty much means that all identity is always ideological all the time.

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case: or better, our purpose is to consider how a “literary” response to the “political” question of our being or not being “really and truly” ourselves relates to both Adorno’s and Jameson’s truth-claims about “truth.”4 Taken in full, this lesson’s title is a mash-up of three sentences, one from a contemporary feminist visual artist, one from a seventeenth-century rationalist philosopher, and one from a nineteenth-century symbolist poet. The title’s first words—“You are not yourself ”—are taken from a 1983 Barbara

4

For much more discussion, see Ralph Chare’s entry on “Identity Politics,” David Shumway’s entry on “Ideology,” and Mike Hill’s chapter on “Identity Studies” in the BHLCT (2019: 527–8; 528–9; 281–95). There will be another gloss on “identity politics” in Lesson Ten. Excursus on “lending a voice to suffering”: Since both Adorno and Jameson are resolutely Marxist, both of their truth-claims about truth are conscientiously “political.” But while Adorno’s stance on the “condition of all truth” is morally or ethically political, Jameson’s description of what must accompany the practice of “truth” is, one might argue, aesthetically or poetically political as well, not because the claim itself is aesthetically pleasing, but if only because of the way it couples those unsightly terms “defamiliarization” and “demystification.” The first term, as we’ll consider more fully in Lesson Seven, hails from the formalist poetics of Viktor Shklovsky. But the term “defamiliarization” is also quite relevant to the philosophical hammerings of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, as we read in the previous lesson, issued the famously “anti-moral” and “anti-veridical” truth-claim that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58)—and who for this and other reasons isn’t exactly a Christian or Marxist saint. As for “demystification,” that critical procedure has pretty much been the prime directive of all “Enlightenment” thinking since Kant, and it remains an indispensable weapon in the Marxist arsenal for any assault against “false consciousness.” But if reification is still the principal method of “mystifyingly” maintaining “false consciousness” within the ideological machinations of late capitalism itself, “demystification” would have to equal “dereification” for Jameson and would have be a crucial aspect of theory insofar as theory must involve our “attempt to dereify the language of thought” (2009: 9). But here— returning to this lesson’s focus on identity (and remembering the footnote called “Where does it hurt?” in the Preface)—is the point of seeming tension between Adorno’s stance and Jameson’s. Many people, particularly (but not only) among the poor and working class, the dispossessed and wretched of the earth, pretty much depend upon “false consciousness” to make their sufferings bearable—they depend, in other words, on religious (rather than secular) faith, on a ridgidly familiarized sense of self-identity recognized by parents, priests, and despots, blessed by a beneficent deity, etc.: such people do not “suffer” from “false consciousness” so much as they enjoyably benefit from it. To subject such sufferers to abrasively dereifying, defamiliarizing, and demystifying revelations or “truths” would surely only increase their sufferings. And so if Adorno’s “lending a voice to suffering” is taken to mean alleviating suffering, protecting the immiserated from even more pain than they already feel, then in this case compassionately hiding or withholding theoretical “truth” becomes the very “condition of all truth.” But this seeming tension is actually an old problem in Marxian analysis, one solved in advance by Marx himself: for just as he insists that “the point” is not simply to interpret the world but to change it, so the early Marx writes that the political objective of a “ruthless criticism of everything existing” is not simply to destroy people’s illusions but to destroy or abandon or otherwise change “a condition that require illusions”. Religion, as Marx quite famously opines, is “the opium of the people” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 27), and while, again, “the need to lend a voice to suffering” may be “the condition of all

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Kruger photograph, upon which they appear prominently and in Kruger’s trademark futura bold italic font. The “subject” of the photograph is a woman’s face reflected in a broken mirror. A densely reticulated circular shape appears in the top portion of the frame, and lines of fracture radiate from this point of presumably violent impact (perhaps the woman threw some blunt object at the mirror, or perhaps she hit it with her own forehead in anger, frustration, or disgusted selfhatred). The letters of the words “You” and “are” are scattered across the top of this scene of disintegration, those of “yourself” are strewn about the bottom, while the three comprising the word “not” are positioned in a straight line at the exact center of the visual space. The photograph positions its spectator, you who are looking at it, as the “You” addressed in its textual overlay, so that in viewing this shattered image you are prompted to see “yourself” in and as the fragments of the woman, of this “other” who—unless you just happen to be she who posed for the picture—is “not” exactly you. As for the imaginary woman, she isn’t quite herself either. Nor does she seem to be particularly enjoying “joying in the truth of self-division” (Kristeva 1982: 89). Her expression sorrowed, her gaze downcast, a teardrop clinging to a piece of broken glass, “she” appears to be looking not at you or “You” or even at her own face within the frame but down and out, past “yourself,” perhaps at her own body, not shown, or perhaps at some missing shard of reflection that has fallen away from the frame and which “gives her back” some tiny piece of “herself ” from the floor. At bottom left there’s a disconnected hand with polished fingernails, presumably hers, shown holding a mirror-fragment like a piece of jigsaw truth” for Adorno, “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism” (1844/1978: 54; 26) for the early Marx. But the point of lending a voice to suffering is not simply to offer the sufferer a comforting fix, any more than the point of criticizing religion is to stoically “just say no” to all spiritual narcotics and deny oneself and everyone else the “promise of happiness” they provide. Rather, as Marx writes: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of [people], is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 27). “Criticism,” Marx continues, “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that [people] shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that [they] shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions [people] so that [they] will think, act and fashion [human] reality as [humans] who have lost [their] illusions and regained [their] reason” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 27). The question taken up by Nietzsche and his non-Marxist followers (like Foucault) involves the extent to which life itself might be a condition that, at least for humans, absolutely requires illusions, requires art, much more than it demands or even involves “reason” or “truth.” The question for Nietzsche is whether all the thinking, acting, and fashioning of human reality of which Marx speaks aren’t fundamentally aesthetic (rather than moral, rational, or veridical) phenomenon. We’ll be returning to this question.

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puzzle. A sliver of white space just below the hand-held fragment brings it into relief, suggesting that the hand is either pulling this piece of glass away or attempting (in apparent futility) to put it back in place, to restore the broken mirror to something resembling wholeness. If you were looking at this photograph as I at this very moment am— not on the wall of a gallery or in a book or on a computer monitor or cellular screen but while holding it as a postcard between the thumb, middle and index fingers of your own left hand, with the index extended along the card’s edge—then your own hand would, like mine, be visually replicated by that of the woman in the photograph itself. Perhaps this replication implicates us in what Walter Benjamin calls “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” since what we hold and behold is not the “original” artwork, imbued with a quasi-sacred “aura” of singularity, but the “same” work in its cheaply mass-reproduced commodity form.5 But this “manual” and “digital” reproduction (of our own hands and fingers) can also raise the unsettling question of whether we “consumers” of contemporary art can ever masterfully “hold” this little picture (like little Ernst holds his reel in the fort-da) or whether “the picture” is not holding “us,” framing us, containing us, taking us in, cutting off some little piece of You yourself—mon semblable!—that none of us will ever get back (together with) again. Kruger’s photograph, then, achieves its alienating effects by implicating its viewers and readers in the “self-shattering” message that it both verbally delivers and visually enacts: You are not yourself. And so Kruger’s piece of jagged edginess not only provides us with the first sentence of our lesson’s titular mash-up but also leads us nicely (if that’s the appropriate word) to Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” For the first paragraph of Lacan’s most famous écrit features a discursive fragment of the second portion of the present lesson’s title. Here Lacan writes of a certain “experience”—an early experience of constitutive “misrecognition” or méconnaissance—that sets

5

Writing in the 1930s about photography and cinema as serious but accessible popular arts, Benjamin argues that the artwork in the modern age suffers disenchantment as it gains democratic mass appeal. In modernity, Benjamin says, art loses its aura, both its elitist, aristocratic associations and its hallowed connection to religious ritual. While in the past some paintings were not publicly displayed but kept locked away in cathedrals to be seen by only a few, a Hollywood film is of course produced to be viewed by as many as possible. And while today one might still want to make a quasi-religious pilgrimage to, say, the Madrid to see Picasso’s “Guernica” in all its horrific and “auratic” splendor, no one would go out of her way to see the original print of, say, Saw IV or The Human Centipede or the latest cinematic “marvel.” Indeed, today, with almost all the cinema in the world always streaming directly into our domiciles, we can now forego traveling to the radiant multiplex altogether.

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psychoanalytic theory “at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito” (1966b/2006: 75). Cogito is of course short-hand for René Descartes’ slogan cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” the “root” statement of logically self-reflective self-certainty from which modern Western rationalist philosophy is usually considered to stem. The “experience” of which Lacan speaks, on the other hand, involves that fateful historical moment in which the human infant first apprehends its “self,” first feebly “grasps” its “own” image, in an “anthropogenetically” reflecting surface. This event can take place . . . from the age of six months; its repetition has often given me pause to reflect upon the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet mastered walking, or even standing, but who—though tightly held by some prop, human or artificial (what, in France we call a trotte-bébé)—overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the constraints of his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning forward position and take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind. (1966b/2006: 75–6)

Now, our initial questions about this little piece of theatre—and Lacan refers to a mirror stage to invoke theatrical performance rather than to designate some “organic” phase or natural plateau of human psychic development—are these: Why does it prompt Lacan to oppose “any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito?” How does Lacanian speculation about the psychic consequences of baby’s first mirror experience disrupt the Cartesian equation of epistemological activity (“I think”) with ontological self-certainty (“therefore I am”)?6 What is it about the formation of the “I function” through what Lacan calls “homeomorphic identification” (1966b/2006: 77) that will eventually lead him to make mincemeat of the cogito in the following manner? I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking. These words render palpable to an attentive ear with what elusive ambiguity the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal string. What we must say is: I am not, where I am the plaything of my thought; I think about what I am where I do not think that I am thinking. (1966e/2006: 430). 6

Epistemology is “the branch of philosophy that is concerned with theories of knowledge” (Childers and Henzi 1995: 98), while ontology, “literally translated as ‘the science of being,’ ” involves “the study of existence itself ” (214). In regard to the cogito, Childers and Henzi point out that “Descartes’ formulation ‘I think, therefore I am,’ while a statement of ontology or being, is also fundamentally epistemological” (98).

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Finally, why would a clinical psychoanalyst like Lacan—ostensibly devoted to “the healing arts,” to the therapeutic project of reducing human suffering, making people “feel better” about themselves—develop such a painfully bewildering style of writing as what we witness here, a “violent” style that produces in the reader what Jane Gallop calls a “great malaise,” an aggressively disintegrative style that causes the typical reader “to feel non-identical to herself as reader” (1985: 117)? We can address these questions only by continuing to read, however that activity might make us feel. And if our feeling upon attempting to come to terms with Lacan (or any difficult theoretical writer) is anything but placidly oceanic—provoking more alienation than jubilation, more unease than selfconfident calm or consistency, security, and repose—then our sensations of readerly malaise, of self-divisive dis-ease, may be related to what Lacan considers the infant’s experiences of ambivalence and misrecognition when it first appears to itself (as an other) upon the mirror stage, on “the threshold of the visible world” (1966b/2006: 77)—when it first begins to subject its sense of being-in-the-world to the articulated process by which “the specular I” or imaginary ego “turns into the social I” (1966b/2006: 79), the subject of the symbolic order. Perhaps Lacan’s writing provokes the reader’s malaise and alienation all the better to illustrate the point that “malaise and alienation” are the subjective conditions of reading and writing as such, to better illuminate the poet Artur Rimbaud’s grammatically deformed observation (and this is the third source of our lesson’s titular pastiche) that “Je est un autre”—“I is an other” (1871/1966: 304). Perhaps Lacan’s style makes the reader feel nonidentical to herself as reader because his writings “can be understood only in reference to the truth of ‘I is an other,’ less dazzling to the poet’s intuition than it is obvious from the psychoanalyst’s viewpoint” (1966c/2006: 96). For Lacan, then, the problem with “any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito” is that such reflection remains oblivious to this dazzlingly defamiliarizing “truth.” Just as Freud (and Nietzsche before him) objected to rationalism’s reduction of all psychic activity to intentional consciousness, its indifference to unconscious motivations and desires (particularly its own), so Lacan opposes the cogito’s seemingly seamless equation of epistemology with ontology, of meaning with being. For Lacan, as we’ve read, the thinking subject may very well desire to be, but it is required, instead, to mean, ordered to symbolize; meaningful thinking—for all the reasons belabored in previous lessons—always entails a lack or dislocation of complete being: to mean means not really, finally, or fully to be. So for Lacan it can’t be the case that “I think, therefore I am.” What the case must be, rather, is that “I think [that is, cognitively participate in meaning only] where I am not [that is, in the symbolic, where I must lack completely real being] . . . I am not [that is, I lack

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completely real being] where I am the plaything of my thought”—which can be nowhere else but in the symbolic. The ecstatic “truth of self-division” that Lacan and I are driving at here involves the irreducible “splitting of the subject,” our unavoidable separation and alienation from ourselves in language. Linguistic self-estrangement is unavoidable for Lacan, and for you and I, because (1), like you, I have no “I” to speak of unless I can speak of it, and (2), I can speak and think of myself only by discursively splitting myself in two, scissoring myself, on the one hand, into the subject who performs the speaking and thinking and, on the other, into the potentially losable object—the elusive “ring” or “plaything”—of my “own” speech and thought. Whenever I put myself into play; whenever I put myself into words (as I must, if I want to participate in human reality); whenever I say, think, or otherwise mean “I,” I inevitably (albeit unconsciously) end up with more than one “I” (an embarrassment of rIches). I am thus put into the position of having to play the game of fort-da with myself, or at least of having to open myself, playfully or painfully, to the division between signifier and signified, the gap between what I say I am and what I think I mean (which, come to think of it, might also involve the split between “things as they are and things as they might otherwise be”). Lacan, being Lacan, exacerbates this gap, this crack, this fissure, and throws a handsawed bit of Hamlet into the breach, by thinking to ask: Is the place that I occupy as a subject of the signifier concentric or eccentric in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified? That is the question. The point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak. (1966e/2006: 430).

For Lacan, the only valid responses here are: (a) eccentric, and (b) not the same. Because I is an other, you are not yourself—all of which means, among other things, that our mutual friend “the cogito” just isn’t going to cut it anymore, at least not “directly,” and certainly not after “the linguistic turn” in the human sciences, not after “language invaded the universal problematic and everything became discourse” (Derrida 1966/1978: 280). But let’s return, you and I, to the moment of the mirror stage, an “imaginary” event which does seem to complicate the cogito to no end but which would also seem to be a scene of cognitive “jubilation” rather than discursive alienation. As we’ve read, Lacan describes the infant at/upon this stage as a sort of speechless early reader, leaning towards the “first page” of its self-reflection “in a flutter of jubilant activity . . . in order to fix it in his mind.” Lacan then repeats the happy adjective, asserting that

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the jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in its primordial form. (1966b/2006: 76).

And of course there is cause for celebration, for a bit of the old “hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” here, for no “little man” is ever going to make it far in “the visible world” without a sense of identity, a valid ID or a vehicular I of some make or model.7 But in Lacan’s account, the infant, prior to its premiere upon the mirror stage, lacks any formal sense of self, doesn’t yet possess an ego, is not yet strictly speaking an “I,” is not yet perceptually coordinated as the subjective locus or pivot of its “own” experience of being-in-the-world. Subjectivity, mind you, depends upon a working sense of differentiation, depends upon knowing the difference “between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt” (1966b/2006: 78), the inner world and the great outdoors. But as Lacan suggests elsewhere, “the very young child’s experience of itself . . . develops on the basis of a

7

Gentlemen, start your engines: The words “hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” appear at the beginning of the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922/1986: 314); according to Gifford, these words represent “The cry with which a midwife celebrates the birth of a male child as she bounces it to stabilize its breathing” (1988: 408/09). Here, though, against Lacan’s little (white) mannerisms, let’s first of all remember that the small animal whose image bounces back to it in the mirror isn’t necessarily male, or white, and, following the vehicular metaphors employed above, that in some countries an adult female of any complexion can’t legally operate an auto or even obtain a license to drive (see Milani 2011). The point to be driven home here is that it isn’t simply natural “breathing” but socio-cultural racing and gendering that starts getting “stabilized” even at such a seemingly “neutral” moment as the mirror stage. In terms of gender, we can deneutralize the ostensibly “universal” mirror-stage experience by bringing in Virginia Woolf ’s observation in A Room of One’s Own that “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (1929/2005: 35)—in other words, for some little girls in some socio-cultural settings, the mirror-stage experience involves learning not only to see themselves in mirrors but to start seeing themselves as mirrors, reflective surfaces in the service of patriarchy. And we can throw the question of what it means to go through the looking glass into a different gear by referring to Frantz Fanon, who throws some shade on Lacan in Black Skin, White Masks by describing how the colonized Black subject has not only to see himself in the mirror as he is seen by (some) others (like everybody else “on the threshold of the visible world” does) but at the same time to self-identify with an abjected image that is despised by the dominant white culture, seemingly by “civilization” itself, so that the internalization of anti-Black hatred becomes the Black infant’s only avenue of self-realization, and so that the mirror-stage paves the way for the Black subject’s first “baby-steps” towards that “crushing objecthood” or “suffocating reification” which awaits it. For more on Fanon and Lacan, see Marriot (2021) and Thakur (2022).

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situation that is experienced as undifferentiated” (1966c/2006: 91), and, unless I’m very much mistaken, this early situation of experiential undifferentiation bears a close resemblance to our long-lost friend and implacable enemy: the real. Let’s say that before and outside the montage of the imaginary and the symbolic, before and outside the limits—and the libidinally normalizing limitations—of human reality, the infant has all of its “eggs” put into this one oceanic “basket,” that the infant has all of its sense of being situated—cathected or “invested”—in this “sea of yolky enjoyment” (Žižek 1989: 40) that is the undifferentiated real. Let’s say that the infant “in the real” doesn’t know the difference between subject and object, interior and exterior, can’t tell the difference between itself and everything else, can’t accurately say where its self-sameness leaves off and everything else or anything other “officially” begins. Nor, let’s say, does the infant “in the real” have any conception of the way its own prematurely born body actually hangs together. If it happens to see its own hand flapping around in front of its as yet self-unseen face, it still may not visually “grasp” the proper connection of hand to arm to shoulder to “self.” Its “own” appendage might register as just another piece of meat swimming in the continuous visual stew, just another blob of perceptual flotsam in the great yolky sea—as, for that matter, might its own mirror reflection, if the infant happens to be exposed to that graceless figure before being developmentally capable of apprehending the image as its “own.” For better and for worse, this oceanic feeling of undifferentiation contracts, dries up, at the moment of the mirror stage. For when the infant, assisted by its human or artificial “prop,” first recognizes itself as “an other” in the mirror, first sees the way its own fairly inept bodily movements correspond to those of the fairer shape or sharper image it beholds before it, it arguably “loses” undifferentiation—and loses it for good.8 The infant—formerly in the real, now formally being hauled out of it—must from now on discern and maintain the difference between itself and everything else, must note the contrast between figure and background, must come to know that “in reality” (as opposed to “in the real”) it is not everything but merely one relatively quite 8

The infant loses undifferentiation “for good” in both the “temporal” and the “moral” senses, both “forever” and “for better”: for once the infant fixes its distinct image of itself in its mind, once the infant is installed in the imaginary and the symbolic, there’s no “going back” to the real for the subject as subject, however much the fantasy of return might animate a subject’s unconscious desire (and in a sense all fantasies are this fundamental fantasy, including, perhaps, the fantasy that “all fantasies are this fundamental fantasy”). But this fantasmatic return “to an earlier state of things” is both spatio-temporally impossible and “morally” prohibited (since, as we discussed in the previous lesson, primal undifferentiation is “eroto-thanatically” analogous to “incestuous” merger with the maternal).

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diminished thing, one “miserable glass shell of human individuality” (Nietzsche 1872/2006: 82) among others, what Freud ego-deflatingly calls a “shrunken residue” (1930/1989: 725), a separate and much smaller entity, constitutively discontinuous with everything else in the visible world. However, beholding for the first time its own head tottering on its shoulders, as well as their connection to its own arms and hands, the infant may now be gratified to see that in the Umwelt—in external reality as represented in this “other scene” out there—its body does seem to hold together in an “ideal” or formally coherent way, or at least in a much better way than anything the infant had heretofore imagined. This ideal morphological “unity of self ” was imperceptible, unimaginable, in the indifferent time before the mirror stage, back “in the real,” when and where the infant will have thus experienced itself as a corps morcelé, a “body-infragments.” But as my emphatic and confusing use of the future anterior (the phrase will have thus) might suggest, here’s where “things” get particularly complicated, logically and chronologically, for the newly reflective “little man” (if not for the malaised reader of “The Mirror Stage” essay itself). For if a “fragment” is thinkable as fragment only in differential relation to the idea of some unbroken unity or whole, then how in the visible world could the infant—prior to the mirror stage, still residing within an experientially “undifferentiated” situation—be said to imagine itself as a fragmented body? Well, logically and chronologically, it couldn’t, and Lacan doesn’t exactly say that it does. What Lacan writes is that the mirror stage is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: [it] is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. (1966b/2006: 78)

Now, to say that the mirror stage is experienced as a temporal dialectic is to suggest, among other things, that its effects and causes are never immediately present but must be read as unfolding in time.9 In other words, 9

Dialectic can be provisionally described as a model of conceptual or subjective agency that proceeds through confronting contradiction, particularly the conceptual agent’s contradictory self-alienation or difference from itself, without necessarily trying to contain or resolve contradiction. When associated with Hegel, the dialectic is often reduced, inaccurately, to an abstract “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” formula and to the

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the narrative of the formation of the I function must be read in a sort of temporal loop, backwards as well as forwards, with an eye towards the phenomenon that Freud calls Nachträglichkeit, “deferred action” or “retrodetermination” or “retroversive causality.” What occurs in a typical episode of psychic Nachträglichkeit is that a subject will experience a “new” discovery that retroactively “recodes” the memory of some earlier experience, imbuing the remembered event with a significance (typically a sexual significance) that it previously lacked. This freshly reinterpreted experience then circles back from the past to bear down upon and “pre-recode” the present revelation. Considering, then, the “bad timing” of the corps morcelé in the light of Nachträglichkeit, we see that the infant in the undifferentiated real can’t cognitively experience itself at that time as an insufficient body-in-fragments. This can’t be the case because the infant can’t very well experience undifferentiation and insufficiency simultaneously (since “insufficiency” can be experienced only in differential relation to some ideally sufficient image). Never having seen its ego ideal/ideal ego before, never having seen its own “up-standing” self up-close and personal, the infant “in the real” can’t have the faintest suspicion that there’s ever been anything “wrong” with it. It’s only after the moment of the mirror stage, only after the “orthopedic” or corrective notion that any synthesis or unification of opposites becomes a new thesis which in turn generates another antithesis which is then overcome, or sublated, by an even greater synthesis, and so on, until ideally all ontological/epistemological contradiction is resolved or subsumed into the rational/conceptual maw of “absolute knowing”—a Hegelian term sometimes “vulgarly” understood to represent Hegel’s hubristic faith in the philosophical possibility of rationally possessing a totally complete and absolutely unified knowledge of “the ultimate meaning of everything” (Findlay 1971: 93). We will consider Hegelian matters much more extensively in our next lesson. But since we are here trying to come to terms with Lacan and the dialectic, I will let a few sentences from Fredric Jameson’s essay “Lacan and the Dialectic” serve to further provisionally describe the latter term: “At its most general,” Jameson writes, “we can call dialectical any thought mode which grasps its objects, terms or elements as subject to definition, determination or modification by the relationships in which they are by definition seized” (2006: 395). Countering the pseudo-dialectic of “vulgar Hegelianism,” Jameson writes that the dialectic “is a tormented kind of language which seeks to register incommensurabilities without implying any solution to them by some facile naming of them, or the flatteningout of this or that unified philosophical code” (2006: 375). One might note here that Lacan’s “dialectical” writing is not only a “tormented” but a tormenting “kind of language.” Hence the “great malaise” produced by Lacan’s style, if not, paradoxically, by Lacanian therapy, in the clinical experience of which the discovered lack of “any solution” to the problem of lack, the problems of contradiction and alienation and castration, becomes itself the solution to the problem. In clinical terms, the absolute lack of cure turns into the cure itself. In Slavoj Žižek’s Wagnerian terms, the cure involves the realization that “the wound is healed only by the spear that smote you” (1993: 165). Meanwhile, in stylistic terms, the “great malaise” produced by Lacan’s writing—i.e., the speared or smitten reader’s feeling of non-identity with herself as reader—paradoxically becomes the very standard of Lacanian health and well-being.

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perception of a totally coherent “body image,” that the infant’s earlier and “innocent” experience of the real is retroactively re-imagined as one of “organic inadequacy” (1966b/2006: 77), of corporeally scattered insufficiency, of not being up to snuff. The fantasy of the hellishly fragmented body (Lacan references the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch in this regard) gets retroprojected onto the infant’s “lost” situation of undifferentiation, while “the lure of spatial identification,” in the form of the fantasy of the “ideal-I,” gets projected into its future as a desirable “dialectical” resolution to what will have become the problem of fragmentation. Thus Lacan writes of “the dialectic syntheses by which [the subject] must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality” (1966b/2006: 76). The subject of the mirror stage is suspended between the “insufficiency” of a still-present past and the “anticipation” of an attractive future good. The subject is situated between the (bad) idea of the fragmented body (which the subject is told, in so many words, that it should desire to forget or repress, should desire to start moving away from) and the (good) ideal of the unified, non-discordant self, the imago of the purely selfidentical I (which the subject gets told, in so many words, that it should eventually add or shape or live up to).10

10

It’s instructive to read the dynamics of Lacan’s mirror stage in relation to Freud’s slogan Wo Es war, soll Ich werden— “where id was, there ego must be” (1933/2001: 80), or “where it (Es) was there I (Ich) must come into being.” But it’s also important to grasp the counter-intuitive coordinates, the weird when’s and where’s and there’s, of this egoboosting scenario. If, that is, we apply our habituated, common-sense understanding of the difference between an “I” and an “it”—a pure self and a mere thing, an active subject and an inert object—to the scene of the very young human child situated in front of a mirror, our normal tendency would be to think of the child as being situated on the “spiritual” side of the I/self/subject and the mirror as being on the “material” side of the it/thing/object. In the first moments of the mirror encounter, however, these “sides” are actually reversed: the real living body of the child is, precisely, the soulless and unspiritualized “it,” while the ego or “I” initially “resides” in a contraption of deadwood and glass, the mirror as lifeless thing or inanimate object. One of the many paradoxes here is that the infant exits the real and begins to enter human reality by virtue of a formally mortifying experience. Or, more precisely, at the crucial moment of the mirror experience, a specter of human reality, launched from the “dead” side of the mirror’s surface, enters and inhabits/inhibits the body of the helpless child, so in a sense it’s from the position of the mirror image that the Wo Es war, soll Ich werden is articulated: where “it,” that stupidly living body, is, there “I,” a culturally endorsed form, will move, intervene, plant my flag, etc. In their 1999 film The Matrix, the Wachowskis visually literalize this “extimate” movement of cultural intervention: after Neo takes Morpheus’s red pill, he sees his own image, at first cracked and then “whole,” in a mirror. When Neo reaches out and touches this mirror, its surface begins to liquefy, moving out from the frame and onto Neo’s personal space, covering his hand and arm and creeping quickly up his neck, eventually “invading” his interior by cascading down his open throat. Assuming, consuming, or introjecting his own image, Neo is forced, as it were, to eat himself. In a sense, as we’re just about to see, all “former subjects-to-be” are similarly force-fed ideology.

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But as these emphasized shoulds should suggest, here’s where the “political” or ideological aspects of “morphological mimicry” (1966b/2006: 77) come to the foreground. Here’s where the little man’s “house of mirrors” starts to look like the “department of corrections” that it actually pretty much is. For like everything else in a world that must be made to mean, the imposing ego ideal that appears in a mirror doesn’t grow on a tree or fall from the sky but is produced through human labor. As we’ll see, a mirror is never simply a neutral or objectively reflecting surface but is always “political” to its very tain.11 The mirror experience functions as the enabling gateway to a whole host of socially produced images, each ready to play its “orthopedic” part in the larger “cultural intervention” (1966b/2006: 79), each lying in wait for its chance to subject the subject to the rigors of “identificatory reshaping” (1966c/2006: 95). In other words, the subject of the mirror stage is always already subjected to ideology, and “ideology” is the precise term for and of this subjection.

II: Ideology is eternal Although Lacan never employs the word “ideology” in the mirror-stage essay, he nonetheless insists that what the mirror stage represents is not “a natural maturation process” but a “cultural intervention” (1966b/2006: 79). For Lacan, the ideal “specular I” that the infant is encouraged to mimic is a culturally “orthopedic” or corrective form, “the root-stock of secondary identifications . . . subsuming the libidinal normalization functions” (1966b/2006: 76). In “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan suggests that these “secondary identifications” work by virtue of the subject’s “introjection of the imago of the parent of the same sex,” and he thus stresses “the ‘pacifying’ function of the ego-ideal: the connection between its libidinal normativeness and a cultural normativeness” (1966c/2006: 95). Now, boys and girls, what does it mean for Lacan to connect “morphological mimicry” to “libidinal normalization” to “cultural normativeness”? It means that no mirror in the history of the world has ever just “objectively” given back the simple reflection of a “good” little boy or girl anatomically destined to naturally mature and/or libidinally blossom into “normal” heterosexuality. Rather, the mirror functions as a socio-cultural “apparatus” that “imposes” and “naturalizes” the vision of an always-already socio-cultural subject who had better get its act together, who had better perform its mimicry correctly, and who had better turn out straight. For Lacan, the subject’s eventual 11

The “tain” is the foil or silvered backing applied, by dint of human labor, to a piece of glass (itself produced through labor), thus turning it into a mirror.

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concordance with its “own reality” entails a rather large quantum of fearbased conformity with the “pacifying” function of the ego ideal; this “forced humanization” involves the coerced internalization of the “appropriate picture,” the successful introjection of the imago of the parent of the same sex (who, as “successful” parent or effective “prop,” must be presumed to have turned out “straight” themselves), and a perpetual identification with and docile endorsement of all the images of compulsory normativity that a given culture proffers. The operative critical idea here is that any existing culture, working or doing business as a “system of constraints” (Greenblatt 1995: 227), depends upon the institutional circulation of normativizing images to continue to exist, to work, to “reproduce its conditions of production.” This last phrase comes to us from Marx via Louis Althusser, to whose essay “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” we now turn. For here Althusser develops an innovative and influential theory of ideology based in no small part on Lacan’s insights into the mirror stage. What Althusser theorizes, however, is not any particular ideology but “ideology in general” (Adventures: 135). In other words, Althusser isn’t into analyzing “isms” as codified sets of political ideas or “articles of faith” to which various individuals in a given society might consciously subscribe. Nor is he about debunking some specific “ism” as a pernicious piece of ideological “false consciousness.” Rather, Althusser sees “ideology in general” both as a pervasively unconscious formation and as “a necessary element of ‘sociality’ itself ” (Kavanagh 1995: 314). Ideology in general is “a structure essential to the historical life of societies . . . indispensable in any society if [individuals] are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence” (Althusser, in Kavanagh 1995: 314). Because all human individuals are born prematurely, not “fully equipped” to respond to even the most basic existential demands, every stinking one of us must be formed and transformed, socialized and cultivated, brought into the fold of human reality in its current historical form. For Althusser, then, the phrase “ideology in general” designates a formal, structural, transhistorical, even “eternal” aspect of socialization, that “extraordinary adventure” which “transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child” (1971/2001: 139–40). Ideology “in general” is now and forever integral to the forced “humanization of the small biological creature that results from human parturition” (1971/2001: 140). Althusser thus isn’t concerned with specific “isms” that turn otherwise perfectly nice people into sinister or tedious “ideologues.” Rather, he investigates “ideology in general” as the necessary process that makes people people to begin with, the work that transforms organisms into subjects “in

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the first place.” Althusser is concerned not with ideological content, with what some specifically espoused ideology is, but rather with the ideological function, what “ideology in general” does and how it does it. The first and overarching function of ideology is to secure “the reproduction of the conditions of production” (Althusser 1971/2001: 85). By “production” Althusser means the actual making of the world that must be materially made, that must be humanly generated or manufactured (that doesn’t grow on trees or fall from the sky). The “conditions of production” include both the “productive forces” (humans in and as their “labor power” to make the world) and “the existing relations of production” (1971/2001: 86)—the cooperative or conflictual relations of these producers (1) to each other; (2) to other humans (in a class society, these would be the owners of production, who don’t produce but who extract wealth and power from the workers who actually do; and (3) to the product(s) or fruit(s) of their labor (all the manufactured objects in the world and, in the largest “materialist” sense, the very history of the world, the very “world history” that they—we—are in the process of producing). Now, the historical conditions of production or “world-making” are such that they always necessarily have to be reproduced: structurally, transhistorically, universally, “eternally,” the world must be made and remade. Such remaking involves physical, material, and of course sexual reproduction (the producers themselves must be produced—or, as Shakespeare’s Benedick crows in Much Ado about Nothing, “the world must be peopled!”). It is thus a truth universally acknowledged that “the ultimate condition of production is . . . the reproduction of the conditions of production”—or at least Althusser quotes Marx to the effect that “every child knows” (1971/2001: 85) such to be the case. Historical materialism holds these truths to be self-evident: the world must be peopled, and people all over the world always have to work to produce the conditions of their self-population. “Labor” in both senses of the word is an absolutely necessary condition of possibility, never a merely historical contingency. But still one might ask: under what specific and historically contingent conditions do men and women (go into) labor? Leaving aside for the moment the question of the different ways in which “human parturition” might be handled, one can accept the inevitability of labor, can accept that people must work, but nonetheless still wonder: Which people? What sort of work? Under what “working conditions”? And for what actual purpose? Of course, one might imagine a world—a “fully human and humanly produced world” (Jameson 2010: 107)—in which the conditions of production were such that the real purpose of all our work was to produce and reproduce equally humane and equitably humanizing conditions for all of us. Conversely, one

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might imagine a world in which the real “meaning and purpose” of everybody’s work everywhere was to produce wealth and power and pleasure only for some. But look: one doesn’t have to merely “imagine” that latter world. One has only to recognize the contemporary global capitalist world (or “Planet Money,” as I’ve heard the phrase coined) for what it is and as our very “own reality”—not because we all own it, to be sure, but because we actively reproduce its conditions of production, simply by “being ourselves,” simply by living our purportedly “purpose-driven” lives.12 The main purpose driving ideology is, again, to secure the reproduction of the conditions of production. But ideological security apparently requires the labor of “making” historically specific and contingent conditions seem unconditional—necessary, inevitable, and of course “natural”—to the very producers of those conditions. Making the conditional seem unconditional is 12

“Your money or is your life!”: I allude here to “evangelical” blowhard Rick Warren’s 2002 best-seller The Purpose-Driven Life. I would suggest, however, that in a capitalist society it doesn’t really matter what you imagine or believe to be the “purpose” driving your life; in a capitalist society, the real purpose, the real practical effect, of all of your “real life” activities is to create profits for capitalists, to enrich and empower the owners of Planet Money. Not that it always works out that way, but capitalist social reality is intentionally structured so that that’s the dominant effect of your actual living, what your living actually materializes. In capitalist reality, whatever you may imagine, everything that you actually do—living somewhere, eating, drinking, being clothed and shod, being entertained and/or educated, staying healthy, staying alive—requires/costs money, and thus makes money and power for capitalists. Unless you are a capitalist, the work that you do, which makes you some money, ultimately makes more money for capitalists than it does for you, since you turn most of that money back over to capitalists so that you can continue to do all the things mentioned above (i.e., live). So, again, whatever you imagine you’re purposively doing with your life doesn’t really matter a damn; what you’re really doing with your life is generating wealth and power for capitalists, and because “capitalism and actual democracy are incompatible,” you don’t really have any say-so about it. For as Martin Hägglund writes in This Life, “Under capitalism, the purpose of our economic production is already decided. What matters above all is to generate a ‘growth’ of capital in the economy. This purpose is beyond democratic discussion, since it is built into how we measure our social wealth in the first place. . . . Accordingly—as long as we accept the capitalist measure of social wealth—the purpose of our economy [that is, of our actual lives] will remain beyond any possible democratic deliberation” (2020: 271). Hägglund goes on to write that “there is only one fundamental definition of capitalism. Capitalism is a historical form of life in which wage labor is the foundation of social wealth. We live in a global capitalist world because all of us depend for our survival on the social wealth generated by wage labor. . . . The production of all our goods and services is mediated by the social form of wage labor, since even how much free time we have to produce goods or service for nonprofit depends on the wage we receive of the capital we have. Moreover, the production of the capital wealth that is distributed in the form of wages requires that there is a ‘growth’ of value in the economy, which is possible only if we continue to exploit and commodify our lives for the sake of profit. Under capitalism our collective spiritual cause—that for the sake of which we labor—is profit” (2020: 384, emphasis added). See also Henry Giroux’s chapter on “Late Capitalism” in the BHLCT and Matthew Desmond’s chapter called “Capitalism” in The 1619 Project.

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required whenever it appears that workers will continue to work only on condition that their working conditions appear to them as unconditional, unquestionable, absolutely inevitable. Without that ideological “jobsecurity”—the job of ideationally securing people in their jobs, in their allotted places on the figurative or actual “assembly line”—these workers might refuse to work. In order to “make” workers (who) work, to make workers (who) “work all by themselves” (i.e., to “make” them without having overtly and physically to force them, without having to march them off at gunpoint to labor camps or factories or offices or universities), ideology works to “make” contingent conditions appear necessary, to reproduce or represent contingencies as necessities, securing the reproduction of the conditions of production by representing the contingent as eternal. The dominant effect of this reproduction/representation is to render alternative working conditions unrepresentable, even unimaginable, to and for the workers themselves. This work of making the contingent seem eternal involves both reproduction and representation. It depends, actually, upon a crucial shift from “reproductive systems” (involving the biologically real) to “systems of representation” (involving the cultural forms of human reality, pretty much anything comprised of images and/or words). This shift from systematic reproduction to systematic representation leads us to a second major function of ideology. Althusser writes that to secure the reproduction of the conditions of production, ideology “represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (1971/2001: 109; Adventures: 138). “Imaginary” here means imagined, otherwise than real, and so Althusser clearly implies a discrepancy between representations of “imaginary relations” and non-representationally “real conditions.” He suggests, in other words, that people’s real conditions of existence might be otherwise than what they imagine for themselves or see represented to them.13 But “imaginary” also means imaged, comprised of images, involving the social circulation of pictures. Karl Mannheim once observed that “a society is possible in the last analysis [only] because the individuals in it carry around

13

If you can’t bring yourself to imagine a discrepancy between the imaginary relations and the real conditions of your own “purpose-driven” life, consider what happens to Neo in The Matrix. Neo “imagines” or “knows perfectly well” that he is Mr. Anderson who lives and works and is basically in control of his own life; but when he swallows Morpheus’s red pill and “goes through the looking glass” he “awakens” to his real conditions of existence and discovers he is in fact a “coppertop,” a passive, plugged-in, quasi-fetal energy source whose only real purpose “in life” is to generate power for “the matrix,” the computer-generated “system of representations” in which he “lives” out his imaginary relations.

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in their heads some sort of picture of that society” (cited in Kavanagh 1995: 309 ). James Kavanagh writes that “with the important addition of ‘and their place in it,’ ” Mannheim’s observation “might serve as a fair introduction to current ideology theory, which tries to understand the complex ways through which modern societies offer reciprocally reinforcing versions of ‘reality,’ ‘society,’ and ‘self ’ to social subjects” (1995: 309). Ideology designates a rich “system of representations” . . . which helps form individuals into social subjects who “freely” internalize an appropriate “picture” of the social world and their place in it. Ideology offers . . . a fundamental framework of assumptions that defines the parameters of the real and the self . . . Ideology is less tenacious as a “set of ideas” than as a system of representations, perceptions and images that precisely encourages men and women to “see” their specific place in a historically peculiar social formation as inevitable, natural, a necessary function of the “real” itself. (1995: 310)

The basic critical idea here is that men and women, in order to be “men” and “women,” must be “encouraged” to see their allotted places in a particular “social world” as necessary functions of “the real itself ” or else they might not want to stay in their places, might not want to keep being what they “are.” Encouraging people to just “be themselves” and discouraging them from imagining any other destiny, ideology involves systematically framing/forming people, keeping them in line and on task, mainly by “giving” them the impression that by staying “on the job” (of being themselves) they are just “doing what comes naturally.” Impressing us with (and into) our given identities; representing our imaginary relations to our real conditions; offering “reciprocally reinforcing versions of ‘reality,’ ‘society,’ and ‘self ’ [in pictures and in words] to social subjects” (Kavanagh 1995: 309): all of this is ideology’s “business.” And ideology is always quite busy, particularly in those intimately “personal” places where ostensibly non-ideological “common-sense” is most loath to find it. “Common sense,” as you’ll recall, involves the reception/ affirmation of “given meaning,” of whatever seems to go without saying, whatever seems perfectly obvious, self-evident, clear, right, and true—to anyone with “common sense.” But Althusser argues that ideology works its magic by enforcing and reinforcing “common sense,” or, as he puts it (and here’s the third major ideological function), by imposing certain “obviousnesses as obviousnesses.” Althusser writes: It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousnesses as obviousnesses,

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which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable reaction of crying out . . .: “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!” (1971/2001: 116; Adventures: 144–5)

For Althusser, ideology (1) secures the reproduction of the conditions of production by (2) representing people’s imaginary relations to their real conditions in a way that (3) imposes obviousnesses as obviousnesses. By getting social subjects to cough back up its “inevitable” common-sense truisms, ideology offers what Althusser calls “the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen—‘So be it.’ ” (1971/2001: 123). This phrase [‘So be it!’] which registers the effect to be obtained proves that it is not ‘naturally’ so . . . This phrase proves that it has to be so if things are to be what they must be: [i.e.,] if the reproduction of the relations of production is to be assured . . . in the attitudes of the individual subjects occupying the posts which the socio-technical division of labour assigns to them. (1971/2001: 124)

Through this imposition of the obvious as obvious, ideology gets people to work by getting people to work on their attitudes, on the pictures they carry around in their heads, in order to turn what merely happens to be (an historically contingent division of labor) into what “simply” and “obviously” has to be (a veritable “force of nature”). In other words, ideology operates in exactly the same “clarifying” way that Roland Barthes says “myth” functions “today” in the chapter called “Myth Today” in his 1957 book Mythologies. As you’ll recall from our introductory chapter, for Horkheimer and Adorno, “False clarity is only another name for myth” (1947/2002: xvii). Similarly, for Barthes, “myth,” or ideology—the words can be used interchangeably—is a particularly clarified “type of speech,” a “purified” or “depoliticized speech,” a mode of communicative action whose primary function is to “transform history into nature” (1957/1985: 129; Adventures: 86). As Barthes writes Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal. Now this process is exactly that of bourgeois ideology. If our society is objectively the privileged field of mythical significations, it is because formally myth is the most appropriate instrument for the ideological inversion which defines this society: at all the levels of human communication, myth operates the inversion of antiphysis into pseudo-physis. (1957/1985: 142; Adventures: 87)

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To elaborate on this inversion, let’s recall that since “physis” here means the “raw material” of the natural world, the project of “anti-physis” entails the transformative work on or against “brute materiality” in which humans must engage to produce the conditions of their existence, to produce their “worldhistory.” To put this process or project in roughly “dialectical” terms, we can say that if physis stands as the negation or antithesis of constitutively humanizing labor, as the negation of human dignity, autonomy, freedom, etc., then labor itself assumes the form of the negation of this negation: thus “antiphysis” expresses the project of the dialectic of freedom, the productive, progressive, and (one can always hope) liberatory process of our collectively and cooperatively making human history itself—the dialectical project not of interpreting the past but of what Michael Hardt militantly calls “making the present.”14 What Barthes calls “pseudo-physis,” then, would thus be a sort of “bogus nature,” a “naturalized” reproduction/representation of the laborious production of human reality that effectively “freeze-frames” or reifies it. The “inversion of anti-physis into pseudo-physis” thus involves transforming a mutable and (perhaps) progressive human history into an immutable and seemingly inevitable human nature. And this inversion/transformation is the “very principle of myth” (1957/1985: 129; Adventures: 86). As Barthes explains: What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined . . . by the way [people] have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality . . . Myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things; in [myth] things lose the memory that they once were [humanly] made. The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences . . . [Myth] has emptied [human reality] of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance . . . In passing from history to nature, myth . . . abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectic, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the

14

As you’ll recall from our introductory chapter, Hardt, in the essay called “The Militancy of Theory,” writes that “the task of theory is to make the present and thus to delimit or invent the subject of that making, a ‘we’ characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (2011: 21).

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evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something all by themselves. (1957/1985: 142–3; Adventures: 88)15

Now, if turning history into nature is the “very principle” of myth, this principle subtends all three of the major functions of “ideology in general” described thus far. There is, however, a fourth function in Althusser’s narrative, a function which effectively connects the mythological work of making “things appear to mean something all by themselves” with the ideological work of getting workers to “work all by themselves” (Althusser 1971/2001: 123), i.e., without their having to be forced into labor at gunpoint. This function involves “constituting individuals as subjects,” imposing the very “category of the subject” as a primary obviousness, and thus eliciting an individual’s subjective “self-recognition” as an “inevitable reaction,” a “perfectly natural” response. And here’s where Althusser’s theory of ideology gets really “personal.” He writes that “the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology” but adds that “the category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects”: It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary “obviousness” (obviousnesses are always primary): . . . Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word “name a thing” or “have a meaning” (therefore including the obviousness of the “transparency” of language), the “obviousness” that you and I are subjects—and that that does not cause any problems—is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect. (1971/2001: 116; Adventures 144)

For Althusser, the most elementary ideological effect is the recruitment or interpellation of individuals as subjects. Thus ideological analysis “is concerned with the institutional and/or textual apparatuses that work on the reader’s or spectator’s imaginary conceptions of self and social order in order to call or solicit (or “interpellate,” as Althusser puts it, using a quasi-legal term that combines the senses of ‘summons’ and ‘hail’) him/her into a specific form of social ‘reality’ and social subjectivity” (Kavanagh 1995: 310). As Althusser puts it: 15

In a splendid footnote, Barthes writes “To the pleasure-principle of Freudian man could be added the clarity-principle of mythological humanity. All the ambiguity of myth is there: its clarity is euphoric” (Adventures: 88)—an observation that nicely explains why readers who insist upon “clarity,” who like to take their meanings neat, tend to dislike and/or steer clear of theoretical writing: they find its de-reifications dysphoric.

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Ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that “it was really him who was hailed” (and not someone else). (1971/2001: 118; Adventures 146)

In a footnote, Althusser explains that “hailing as an everyday practice subject to a precise ritual takes a quite ‘special’ form in the policeman’s practice of ‘hailing’ which concerns the hailing of ‘suspects’ ” (118/146). And yet he also argues that interpellation as an “everyday practice” is always a “police action” regardless of whether the “hailer” is an actual cop or the “hailed” a guilty perp. In other words, anyone who is anyone, anyone who “answers to the description” of the second-person pronoun in a hailing address—hey, you there!—is ideologically interpellated, effectively constituted or recruited as a subject. Althusser even includes under the rubric of “ideological subjection” such “everyday” banalities as answering “it’s me” to the question “who’s there?” posed from the other side of a knocked-upon door. But here one might wonder: as long I’m not “suspected” of being a “criminal,” a “maniac,” a “terrorist,” a “pervert,” or some other type of “bad subject,” as long as I’m “suspected” only of rather blandly “being myself,” what’s really so “ideological” about my being constituted as a subject?16 In

16

To trouble my own fairly blanched formulation, I’ll ask that question another way: what if I’m suspected not of “blandly being myself ” but of “Blackly being myself,” of “being myself while Black”? Towards the end of his chapter on “Punishment” in The 1619 Project, Bryan Stevenson writes “Hundreds of years after the arrival of the first enslaved Africans, a presumption of danger and criminality still follows Black people everywhere. New language has emerged for the non-crimes that have replaced the Black Codes: driving while Black, sleeping while Black, sitting in a coffee shop while Black. All reflect incidents in which African Americans have been mistreated, assaulted, or arrested for conduct that would have been ignored if they were white. In schools, Black children are suspended and expelled at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior” (2021: 281). And as would have been obvious to me had I been “writing while Black” back around 2009 when I was first composing this lesson, if I were “walking while Black” or, even more precariously, “running while Black” when hearing the hailing “hey you there!” of the “everyday police” in the ideological “street scene” narrated above, my turning around, my 180-degree conversion, could well have gotten my ass not merely “interpellated” but killed.

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Althusser’s view, the problem involves “the ambiguity of the term subject.” As he writes: In the ordinary use of the term, subject in fact means: (1) a free subjectivity, a center of initiatives, author of and responsible for its actions; (2) a subjected being, who submits to a higher authority, and is therefore stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission . . . The individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order . . . that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself ’. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they ‘work all by themselves’. (1971/2001: 123).

And this ambiguity explains why there’s something fundamentally fishy about the category of “the subject,” why “the ‘obviousness’ that you and I are subjects . . . is an ideological effect, the elementary ideological effect” (1971/2001: 116; Adventures: 144): the more self-confidently we “imagine” ourselves as “subjects” in the first sense, the more “freely” we “turn” or screw ourselves into our subjection in the second. But the larger problem involves the type of society by and into which we’re screwed. For example, back when I was first composing this lesson, debates about reform of the “health care system” in the United States were raging. On the op-ed page the New York Times, a pundit named Matt Miller opined against making the health insurance that covers members of the U.S. Congress available to the American public on the grounds that it “does little to encourage people to be smart health care shoppers” (July 21, 2009). Now, it shouldn’t take an Althusserian brain surgeon to diagnose the problem with this symptomatic “encouragement,” to recognize “smart health care shoppers” as an ideologically interpellative phrase that basically prescribes and endorses the commodification of all life in the United States. Attempting to make it seem obvious that whatever is done about the U.S. health care system should “encourage people to be smart health care shoppers,” the phrase “encourages” people to envision “health care” itself only as a shopping item rather than as, say, oh, I don’t know, maybe something like a basic human right. Further, the phrase “encourages” American people to imagine “the American people” themselves only as consumers, smart or stupid, with or without purchasing power, rather than as say maybe a collective of socially empowered citizens with certain inalienable rights (i.e., rights that shouldn’t be privatized, shouldn’t be taken away and then sold back to us as commodities in order to generate abundant monetary health for capitalist oligarchs). The interpellative phrase “smart health care shoppers”

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works to naturalize “market solutions” to all human problems, to represent private property and the neoliberal “free market economy” as inevitable functions of the real itself.17 The phrase reproduces-represents-imposes a world in which, as Fredric Jameson laments, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than to envision the end of capitalism.18 Now, as may or may not be “obvious,” my point in turning to the journalist’s turn of phrase is to connect what occurs “in the text” or “on the page” to the “physical conversion” that transpires in Althusser’s theoretical street-scene, wherein the individual turns into a subject simply by turning in response to a policeman’s hail. In other words, while the pundit’s hegemonic hail “hey, American health care shopper!” may seem “merely textual,” the phrase is structurally complicit with the cop’s more forceful and compelling “hey you there!” The journalist, an editorial agent of an Ideological State Apparatus, works in collusion with the cop, a uniformed agent of the Repressive State Apparatus, to defend, protect, and serve the private property system.19 17

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“Amen—so be it!”: And here’s another example of “mythic” interpellation at work: I was one day on a flight from Atlanta to Salt Lake City and noticed an interesting detail in the airline safety instruction video that played prior to take-off. There came the standard moment in the video when we’re shown how to behave if “cabin pressure drops” and we suddenly find oxygen-masks dangling in front of us. The video depicted a man properly attaching the mask to his own face before turning to help the young male child, presumably a son, sitting beside him; meanwhile the narrative voice-over instructed us to negotiate our own masks first “before assisting other customers”—not the old “others who might need help” or even “other passengers,” but other customers. Thus are we instructed to conceive even (or especially) our own children as corporate capitalism conceives/interpellates them and us: as markets. And the point here is not that reading “ideology at work” in the airline’s safety video entails discerning some “hidden meaning” or “subliminal message.” The “myth” here is anything but subliminal; rather, it’s blatant, an imposed obviousness, as clear as the oxygen mask on your face: You and yours are customers; your life is a commercial transaction; don’t bother with any other flights of fancy; don’t bother imagining alternatives; just relax, sit back, and enjoy the ride. Amen, so be it. “It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (Jameson 1994: xii). Althusser’s theory of ideology is indebted to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which “refers to relationships between classes, specifically the control that the bourgeoisie exerts over the working classes. For Gramsci, hegemonic control is not maintained merely by force or the threat of force, but by consent as well. That is, a successful hegemony not only expresses the interest of a dominant class . . . but also is able to get a subordinate class to see these interests as ‘natural’ or a matter of ‘common sense’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 131). Similarly, Althusser’s distinction between Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses seems based on Gramsci’s “analytical distinction between civil and political society in which the former is made up of voluntary . . . affiliations like schools, families, and unions, the latter of state institutions (the army, the police, the central bureaucracy) whose role in the polity is direct domination” (Said 1979: 7). Althusser distinguishes Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), like the police and the army, which work primarily by repressive force, from Ideological State Apparatuses

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Here, though, let’s turn from the theoretical scene of interpellation, which occurs in “the street,” with its strong police presence, back to Lacan’s earlier “theatrical” scene of mirror-stage recognition, which occurs “in the home,” and from which the constabulary would seem to be missing. Althusser, however, admits the police into the house, shows their warrant to search your imaginary premises, when he writes that “the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects . . . is speculary, i.e., a mirror structure,” and that “mirror duplication is constitutive of all ideology and ensures its functioning” (1971/2001: 122). To see how the “mirror duplication” of the “specular I” functions ideologically, consider the moment in Lacan’s account when he writes that the mirror-stage infant is “held tightly by some prop, human or artificial,” and that the infant “overcomes . . . the constraints of his prop” to better “take in” the view. Implying that it doesn’t really matter whether the “prop” be human or artificial, Lacan suggests both that the artificial prop is laboriously human (i.e., the trotte-bébé contraption is brought about through human labor somewhere in the world, even if our fiercely held commodity fetishism helps us forget that fact) and that the properly human is also artificial—i.e., socially produced through representational labor.20 The mirrored subject is formed by being informed that it should “shape up,” told that it should eventually add or live up to the ideal formal totality that it sees before it. But the agent of this information, the purveyor of this truth, is none other than the aforementioned “prop,” the primary caretaker (let’s say, the mother) who works all by herself, who does her duty and hoists the otherwise incapable one up to eye-level with the mirror and “encourages” it to identify with what it sees. With her

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(ISAs)—churches, schools, families—which function primarily by ideology rather than force. He stipulates, however, that the RSAs are not purely repressive: they depend upon ideology “both to ensure their own cohesion and reproduction, and in the ‘values’ they propound externally” (1971/2001: 98). Nor are the ISAs purely ideological, for “they also function secondarily by repression . . . Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ . . . their flocks. The same is true of the Family” (1971/2001: 98). And we might see how effectively or intersectionally RSAs and ISAs work together in the social reality described by Bryan Stevenson above: African Americans are “mistreated, assaulted, or arrested for conduct that would be ignored if they were white,” and “Black children are suspended and expelled [from schools] at rates that vastly exceed the punishment of white children for the same behavior” (2021: 281). “Fetishism is the endowment of an object or a body part with an unusual degree of power or erotic allure, as in the cases of cultures that attribute magical powers to idols or human effigies. Use of the term often betrays a skeptical attitude toward such beliefs; thus, Karl Marx coined the term commodity fetishism to express the way that capitalist emphasis on the abstract value of commodities conceals the underlying social relations of their producers” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 109).

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own “body language”—her gestures, her looks, her smiles—this supportive “prop” signals a message to the homunculus: “there you are—there’s my good boy!” And the “good boy” normally responds with a flutter of jubilant activity. All seems well and good with this scenario, everything in its right place, everything perfectly obvious and true. For, after all, it’s obviously really him in the mirror and not someone else. But while the maternal “prop” seems only to be doing what would “come naturally” to any human mother, isn’t mumsy actually following certain stage directions, rehearsing pre-scripted lines, performing the duties of “the good mother” as she has seen these chores systematically represented to her basically all her life? Granted, it does seem more “natural” that the mother should at this juncture utter something like “there’s my good boy” rather than raise her fist and shout “Workers of the world unite!” Nonetheless, when “the good mother” says “there’s my good boy,” all these “obvious” terms are actually shot through with political meaning. While “good” would seem to mean inherently worthy of any mother’s love, it could also mean fully compliant with the prevailing norms of the polis, the “historically peculiar social formation” (Kavanagh 1995: 3010) or “historical-normative framework” (Hägglund 2020: 177) in which tot and mom have to live, with all of its attendant “institutions for the enforcement of cultural boundaries through praise and blame” (Greenblatt 1995: 226). As for the tottering tot, is it really all that obvious to him that it’s really him and not someone else who’s being addressed with the “there’s my good boy” line? Or is there not already a self-alienating subtext to his prop’s orthopedic script? Even in the midst of its jubilant flutter, the infant might begin to get the real picture, to “read” between the lines, to hear the inner voice that effectively says: there, reflected in that mirror, not here, in your living body’s immediate experience of itself, is where the “good boy” resides; that figure there who seems to hang together like a little man-in-full, he’s the “good boy,” he’s the version of yourself that we favor, that we like, that we recognize— not you, little mister craps-his-pants, not you, leaky little corps morcelé, still trapped in your motor impotence and nursling dependence, your yolky enjoyment, your polymorphous lack of differentiation, and the devil only knows what else. Small wonder, then, that when you look in the mirror and see how the hip-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone, you hear (and fear) the name of the Lord. But while you might believe that in hearing this call and leaning towards this image “in order to fix it” in your mind you are thereby overcoming the constraints of your “prop,” what you’re actually “leaning into” is an ever more effective system of constraints. Because ideology, mon ami, is eternal, there has always been and will always be a correspondence and

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often a complicity between the prop’s “there you are!” and the cop’s “hey you there!”21

III: Aesthetics of resistance? Is there, then, no possibility of “yours truly” ever resisting or eluding “ideology”? For a hardline Marxist like Althusser, this question truly misses the point. Since “ideology in general” is basically synonymous with socialization (the always necessary process of turning little animals into little human beings), and since our species’ prematurity at birth ensures that the need for socialization “will always be with us” (as Jesus supposedly said about the poor), “ideology in general” is pretty much eternal, elemental, inescapable, for all individuals—past, present, and future. The truly political question, then, is not whether an individual can somehow heroically resist ideological subjection/interpellation; rather, the only valid political question for Althusser concerns the historical character of the society in/to which the individual will be subjected. In the last analysis, an individual like Althusser is less concerned with any individual’s “personal” transformation than he is committed to the radical transformation of all social relations as a whole: In a class society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between [people] and their conditions of existence is settled to the profit of the ruling class. In a classless society ideology is the relay whereby, and the element in which, the relation between [people] and their conditions of existence is lived to the profit of all [people]. (cited in Kavanagh 1995: 313)

Unlike Althusser, however, some theoretical writers interested in questioning identity and effecting political change would settle for less than a fully classless 21

But to make an obvious point to which yours truly was, again, oblivious when writing these pages in 2009, the prop-cop complicity described above is complicated, to say the least, when the parental (paternal or maternal) “props” are BIPOC and when the deputized cop belongs to a colonial police force and/or one that historically developed from the armed slave patrols and militias of the antebellum and post-reconstruction American South. We might remember Fanon’s correction of Lacan, discussed in a footnote above, in this light. Or we might pause to speculate about what might have been a particular Black mother’s delivery, some years ago, of the “there’s my good boy!” line when we read the opening lines of Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander’s chapter on “Fear” in The 1619 Project: “On May 25, 2020, a Black man named George Floyd was forced to the ground by several Minneapolis police officers; he remained there, pinned for more than nine minutes, as Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck, killing him slowly even as he begged for his life and called out to his dead mother” (2021: 98).

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society, or they desire but don’t see the possibility of any such society on the near or far horizon, or they don’t interpret oppression and emancipation primarily or exclusively in Marxian economic terms. These theoretical writers do see individual subjectivity as a possible site of resistance to “naturalized” forms of social domination. They understand “personal identity” as the axis of intersection for a number of discourses of power, as a nodal point for the reproduction of various relations of oppression (including but not limited to economic processes or class). These theorists thus discern liberatory potential— “resistance-value,” or what might be called not “use value” but “ref-use value”— in discourses that disturb, subvert, transform, or even abject self-identity, in whatever might unsettle, short-circuit, or reconfigure the regnant human reality, in whatever helps “to fuck shit up” (Halberstam 2006: 824) when it comes to our standard imaginary relations to our real existential conditions. Michel Foucault, for example, studied arduously with Althusser but never ardently followed Marx. Describing his intellectual training in an interview called “The Minimalist Self,” Foucault writes: “I was a pupil of Althusser, and at that time the main philosophical currents in France were Marxism, Hegelianism and phenomenology. I must say I have studied these but what gave me for the first time the desire of doing personal work was reading Nietzsche” (1983/1988: 8). Now, I would say that this “desire of doing personal work” that Foucault claims to have contracted from reading Nietzsche relates quite intimately to Nietzsche’s “anti-moral” stance that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world justified” (1872/2006: 58). I would venture that Foucault’s desire to do “personal work” corresponds to what he elsewhere calls “the search for an aesthetics of existence,” the “elaboration of one’s own life as a personal work of art” (1984/1988: 51). As we read at the end of the preceding lesson, for Foucault, “personal work” as “intellectual work is related to what you could call aestheticism, meaning transforming yourself ”; Foucault, as we’ve read, believes that “this transformation of one’s self by one’s own knowledge is . . . something rather close to the aesthetic experience” 1983/1988: 14). So while Althusser’s star pupil agrees with his teacher that “the subject is constituted through practices of subjection” (i.e., in politically and economically pre-determined ways), Foucault also believes that we subjects of human reality can reconstitute ourselves aesthetically, self-transformatively, “in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty, as in [pre-Christian] Antiquity, on the basis of course of a number of rules, styles, inventions to be found in the cultural environment” (1984/1988: 50–1). Elaborating on this liberatory stylistics—what I like to call “the will to style”—in an interview entitled “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” Foucault remarks:

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What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? (1983/1997: 261)

Asked how his “aestheticist” perspective differs from the authentically existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Foucault responds: I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre [rightly] avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves—to be truly our true self. I think the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity—and not to that of authenticity. From the [salutary] idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art. (1983/1997: 262)

And when Foucault’s interlocutor remarks that his aesthetic work-ethic, which pits style and creativity against morality and authenticity, “sounds like Nietzsche’s observation in The Gay Science that one should create one’s life by giving style to it through long practice and daily work,” Foucault concurs: “Yes. My view is much closer to Nietzsche’s than to Sartre’s” (1983/1997: 262) Foucault’s perspective is indeed closer to Nietzsche’s than to Sartre’s, or to Althusser’s, or, for that matter, to the revolutionary perspective of Karl Marx. Again, Foucault isn’t a Marxist by any measure (he once expressed the desire never to hear the man’s name again).22 But unlike the unabashedly antidemocratic Nietzsche, or the cheerfully slave-owning citizens of classical Antiquity (remember Aristotle’s stance as quoted in the Preface), Foucault comes off as fairly egalitarian in his radical aestheticism, implicitly refusing the idea that “the practice of creativity” should be reserved for some elite cadre of artists/experts within the ruling class. Foucault, that is, seems more sincere than naïve when he poses the radically democratic “utopian” question: “couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art?” (1983/1997: 261, my emphasis).23 22

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“Don’t talk to me about Marx anymore! I never want to hear anything about that man again. Ask someone whose job it is. Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist functionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of Marx” (cited in Erbion 1992: 266). A probable rejoinder to the “bioaestheticist” Foucault would involve slamming him less for naiveté than for not considering the real plights of immiserated people who are too busy trying to survive the “necropolitics” of the dominant social order to think about

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Moreover, Foucault, though not a Marxist, could be considered a sort of historical materialist, at least to the extent that he doesn’t believe that anything related to our “personal work,” to our human reality, grows on trees or falls from the sky. For Foucault, everything specifically human must involve our old friend antiphysis, must involve human “practices” of power and resistance, of discourse and counter-discourse, of subjection and of liberation—practices of creativity that are simultaneously “political” and “aesthetic” and that can develop only on the basis of “rules, styles, and inventions to be found” nowhere else but in the prevailing “cultural environment,” nowhere else but in a cultural language that is by nature fictional, nowhere else but in our own making of the present, our own creative writing of the “history of the present” (1975/1995: 31). Perhaps the most conspicuous sign of Foucault’s non-Marxist historical materialism is his emphasis on sex, rather than economic class, as a principal vector of oppression and possible self-transformation. In The History of Sexuality and elsewhere, Foucault famously posits “sex” not as some inherently revolutionary “force of nature” to be repressed or liberated but as a sociodiscursive construction, “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power” (1976/1990: 103). Foucault investigates what he calls the “deployment” of sex, the way “sex” is “put into discourse.” He analyzes those strategically “discursive orthopedics” (1976/1990: 29) that “encourage” individuals to understand and articulate their “sexuality” as the “truth” of their “identity.” For Foucault, there are no “natural” or “inevitable” connections among sexual practices, truth-claims, and identity-formations; rather, the connections among sex, truth, and self are produced and enforced through disciplinary turning their “bare lives” into works of art. A fair enough point, but in ways this response itself condescendingly denies creativity or aesthetic agency to any number of BIPOC and/or formerly enslaved “former subjects-to-be.” I would direct anyone who wanted to fault Foucault for his Nietzschean “aesthetics of existence” stance to consider what Nikole Hannah-Jones has to say in the “Democracy” chapter of The 1619 Project: “[S]lavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. . . . [B]ut as much as white people tried to pretend, Black people were not chattel. And so the process of . . . erasing identity served an opposite purpose: in the void, we forged a new culture all our own. Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated to communicate. . . . Our style of dress, the defining flair, stems from the desires of enslaved people—shorn of all individuality—to assert their own identity. . . . Today’s avant-garde nature of Black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of Black art and music comes from a culture that rejected convention in order to cope with constant disruption. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance” (2021: 34–5). The term “necropolitics,” by the way, comes from Achille Mbembe (2019), while the term “bare life” comes from Giorgio Agamben: see Kir Kuiken’s entry on the term in the BHLCT (2019: 383–4).

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institutions, discursive implantations, carceral segregations, capillary relays of power, and panoptical technologies of self-surveillance.24 But since all these “police actions” take place discursively (they are socially enacted in various institutional, medical, psychological, religious, juridical, pedagogical, and literary discourses—what Althusser would consider ISAs), and because they occur at the level of subjectivity/subjection (what Althusser calls interpellation), these practices of sexual self-policing can be confronted and resisted discursively and subjectively as well, through “practices of creativity,” through “deployments” of style and invention. In other words, in Foucault’s view, “we” subjects of the social construction of sex don’t have to wait for a worker’s revolution or for the final breakdown of late capitalism to try to unsettle dominant relations of power, to try to renegotiate sexual identities (or untether “sex” from “identity” altogether), to try to invent new forms of aesthetic existence, new styles of corporeal subjectivity, new ways of orchestrating our “bodies and pleasures” (1976/1990: 159). To re-orchestrate some of Foucault’s words in “The Subject and Power”: we don’t need Marx to “refuse what we are” and “to promote new forms of subjectivity though the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries” (1983/2000: 336). But while we may not need Marx (or Sartre) for this promotion of the subjectively new, this refusal of the centuries-old, we might very well need Nietzsche, as Foucault claims he did, to discover our desire for doing our own “personal work,” for undoing the work that’s already been done on our persons. For if the authentic and moral “kind of individuality” that Foucault stylistically resists here has in fact been “imposed upon us for several centuries,” Nietzsche was one of the first to chafe, rail, and write against the imposition. As for the “individuality” in question, it’s clearly more Cartesian than Nietzschean. As you’ll recall, we began this lesson by considering

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In Discipline and Punish, Foucault “derives the concept of panopticism from a diagram drawn up by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791. Bentham’s Panopticon was a model prison in which supervisors could observe prisoners in their individual cells without being seen themselves. According to Foucault, this system was effective because prisoners never knew whether or not they were being watched: ‘he is seen, but he does not see . . . what matters is that he knows himself to be observed’. Foucault [argues] that this constant sense of surveillance and visibility is what characterizes the development of disciplinary societies in toto. In such societies, ‘the automatic functioning of power’ is guaranteed because individuals police themselves and each other. For Foucault, the notion of individualism in Western society is in fact a direct effect of panopticism. The individual is constructed by having internalized the disciplinary power of penitentiary and/or medicinal discourses, with their numerous methods of segregation and social exclusion. This is why, as Foucault concludes, modern institutions such as hospitals, schools and factories all resemble prisons” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 237).

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Descartes’ cogito ergo sum as a truth-claim involving both epistemology and ontology, both personal knowing and subjective being: in the purely rational truth of Cartesian self-certainty, I think I know both that I am and exactly what I am. As we noted, Lacan opposes any philosophy directly issuing from the cogito because such philosophy reduces all thinking, and hence all being, to rational consciousness. But Nietzsche also objected to this reduction, this “rationing” or reasonable impoverishment of the “aesthetic phenomena” of human psychical life. In Book V of The Gay Science, Nietzsche offers a stingingly “elitist” critique of consciousness, suggesting that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature; that [consciousness] has developed subtlety only insofar as this is required by social or herd utility. Consequently, . . . “to know ourselves,” each of us will always succeed in becoming conscious only of what is not individual but “average.” Our thoughts are continually governed by the [herd] character of consciousness . . . and translated back into the perspective of the herd. (1887/2006: 367–8)

Translating Nietzsche into a sort of Althusserian Lacanese, we could say that our given or conventional sense of self-understanding is dominated by the ideological character of consciousness, governed by the props and cops of the symbolic order. To “know ourselves” under prevalent “herd” conditions means to tame, police, contain, and domesticate ourselves, to convincingly demonstrate that we have assumed or fixed in our minds all the pictures of libidinal and cultural normativity that pertain to us—the images most familiar to and hence most useful for the dominant order in its continuous efforts to secure the reproduction of its conditions of production. If this normalization qua familiarization is actually all that rationally “knowing ourselves” amounts to, then it’s pretty clear that under this epistemological regime any “unfamiliar” aspects of ourselves would have to remain alien, “unknown,” unrealized, excluded from consciousness, hustled into the unconscious and/or projected onto some strange god or abject scapegoat or another. In Nietzsche’s view, maintaining normal everyday consciousness or common sense always depends upon reducing “the strange” to “the familiar.” He sees this “will to familiarize” as the very engine of normative epistemology, as “The [very] origin of our concept of ‘knowledge.’ ” As Nietzsche writes in Gay Science under this titular heading: I take this explanation from the street. I heard one of the common people say, “he knew me right away.” Then I asked myself: What is that the

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common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want “knowledge”? Nothing more than this: Something strange is to be reduced to something familiar. And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home. Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security? (1887/2006: 368)

In bringing the hammer down on “knowledge,” Nietzsche’s writing here adumbrates Althusserian and Lacanian motifs; it features both an ontological scene of common, “street-level” recognition and an epistemological “flutter” of mind-fixing “jubilation,” thus grounding the highest flights of metaphysics in the basest instincts of fear. But if Nietzsche here foreshadows Lacan’s theory of “paranoic” knowledge, he also sets the stage for performing an abrasively Foucaultian “aesthetics of resistance” to fear-based familiarization, to the anxious expulsion of strange “foreign elements” that still seems to dominate our “everyday” self-understanding. Nietzsche, that is, anticipates not only Foucault’s commitment to “aesthetic existence” but Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization as the defining aesthetic technique of all literary writing worthy of the name. We’ll consider Shklovsky’s self-estranging “formalism” at some length in subsequent pages. Here, however, we’ll let his main idea—that literary writing as literary writing defamiliarizes “the subject” of any literary text—remind us of the underlying thesis of this introductory text: that “theoretical writing” is itself a possibly “liberatory practice of creativity,” that “theory” is not merely a way of “approaching” literature but a way of performing the strangely “personal work” of living one’s “life as literature.” Now, having earlier quoted Stephen Greenblatt to the effect that literature is “one of the great institutions for the enforcement” of normative culture as an ideological “system of constraints” (1995: 226, 227), I would be an ass to suggest that “creative” theoretical writing—theory “not of literature but as literature” (Rabaté 2002: 117)—could ever be essentially liberatory, inherently resistant to reification, naturalization, libidinal normalization, etc. I would be an ass to think that “theory as literature” could ever work as a sort of permanently subversive riposte or transcendental antidote to “eternal” ideology, could ever stand as what Foucault dismissively calls the “single

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locus of great Refusal, . . . soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary” (1976/1990: 95–6). After all, some of the “greatest” literary works in the world have worked quite diligently to familiarize and naturalize dominant power relations, reinforce given meaning, impose certain obviousnesses as obviousnesses, and so on. Some “great works of literature” work to disturb particular aspects of regnant human reality while leaving other matters all too comfortably settled, all too readily known. And theoretical writing, like any other kind, can all too quickly become weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, can lose the capacity to desediment, subvert, or surprise, can fail to keep open that crucial antiphysical difference “between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be” (Critchley 1997: 22). But to the extent that theory can stay frosty, can work to remain politically and personally resistant, this kind of writing can invite or provoke all but the most frightened of us to imagine ourselves and “things as they are” otherwise; at its most effective, theoretical writing can make our imaginary relations and our real conditions of existence seem strangely unnatural, radically fictional, anything but inevitable. By delivering, among other malaise-inducing messages, the “ontological bad news” that we are not ourselves, that we can never really or “authentically” be ourselves—along with the “glad tidings” that we don’t necessarily “have to be ourselves,” don’t really have “to be truly our true self ” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262)—theoretical writing might be able to keep us open, if only just barely, to the possibility of self-alteration, the radical practice of creativity, the secular miracle of change.

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Five: identity politics, culture, aura, epistemology, ontology, dialectic, Nachträglichkeit, capitalism, interpellation, hegemony, ideological/ repressive state apparatuses, commodity fetishism, panopticism

Part Two

Extimacy: Five Lessons in the Utter Alterity of Absolute Proximity

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“This restlessness is us” —or, the least that can be said about Hegel

Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our antiHegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us. Michel Foucault (1972: 235)

I: Thesis Hegel is important. Indeed, for many theoretical writers, the name “Hegel” practically signifies importance itself. In Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, Jean-Luc Nancy calls Hegel “the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world” and identifies Hegel as “the first to take thought out of the realm of identity” (2002: 3, 55). In Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France, Judith Butler writes that her theoretical work began and still “remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian questions: What is the relation between desire and recognition, and how is it that the constitution of the subject entails a radical and constitutive relation to alterity?” (1999: xiv). Slavoj Žižek also situates his work in the Hegelian orbit: “Ultimately,” he declares, “if I am to choose just one thinker, it’s Hegel. He’s the one for me . . . He may be a white, dead, man or whatever the wrong positions are today, but that’s where I stand” (in Rasmussen 2004). Andrew Cole gives Hegel the primary place in his 2014 book The Birth of Theory. And in The Future of Theory, Jean-Michel Rabaté, noting “the almost ineluctable Hegelian inflection given to any discourse that presents itself as ‘literary theory,’ ” insists “that a patient reading of Hegel . . . is, if not a prerequisite, at least an essential step on the way to an understanding of theory” (2002: 39, 21). 135

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So, from the future of theory to its birth and back again, Hegel is important—if not, at least in theory, importance itself.1 And yet, in the preceding pages of this discourse, which certainly “presents itself ” as literary theory and as a guide to understanding theoretical writing, Hegel is mentioned by name only twice (once in the footnoted gloss on the term “phenomenology” and again in the footnoted gloss on the term “dialectic”). And in fact most introductory guides to theory make similarly reductive gestures (or none at all) towards Hegel, even though practically all of the questions raised in such guides are plausibly situated within the Hegelian ballpark, and even though practically all of the heavy hitters of high theory, from Althusser to Žižek, became the theorists they became by first becoming readers, patient or impatient, of Hegel. We might best explain this relative silence about the hugely important Hegel by considering Fredric Jameson’s early warning that “the attempt to do justice to the most random observation of Hegel ends up drawing the whole tangled, dripping mass of the Hegelian sequence of forms out into the light with it” (1971: 306). The problem, that is, facing the writer who would introduce theory is that even the briefest reference to Hegel can transmogrify into a massive treatise on Hegel, a gnarly epic narrating the restlessly negative, formally sequential, spirally all-encompassing corpus of Hegelian thinking— a.k.a. “Absolute Knowing”—itself.2 To avoid getting “totally” caught up in that tangled, dripping, and serpentine mass (Jameson seems to be alluding to Laocoön here), it’s safer just to keep one’s hole shut and not mention Hegel at all.

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The relevance of the following won’t be evident until the end of this lesson, but in This Life Martin Hägglund tells us that Hegel was an “important influence” on Dr. Martin Luther King: “In an interview during the bus boycott of 1956, King told the Montgomery Advertiser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher and references to Hegel recur throughout his work. Already as an undergraduate at Crozer Theological Seminary, King had read Hegel, and while pursuing his doctorate at Boston University he studied Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as well as his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. Indeed, the philosophical discussion group that King hosted in his Boston apartment was called ‘the dialectical society,’ named after the method of philosophy that Hegel articulated and that Marx sought to develop in his own way” (2020: 351). The “anti-Hegelianism” or desire “to escape Hegel” that Foucault mentions above stems primarily from the misperception of Hegel as an abstruse know-it-all who aspires towards or even claims to have arrived at an all-encompassing “Absolute Knowledge” of “the ultimate meaning of everything” (Findlay 1971: 93), a thinker of totality “suspected of totalization, and even of having totalitarian designs” (Malabou 1996/2005: 1). For Žižek, Jameson, Butler, Cole, Nancy, Malabou, Johnston, McGowan, and other contemporary champions of the dialectic, however,“Hegel is the opposite of a ‘totalitarian’ thinker” (Nancy 2002: 8); he “is anything but the cheerleader for an omniscient philosophical self-consciousness, for a complete and exhaustive encyclopedic knowledge from whose firm grasp nothing whatsoever can escape” (Johnston 2008: 128).

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But once safety is abandoned, the hazardous mention made, the introductory writer’s strategic question still remains: what’s the least that can justly be said about Hegel? Clearly “Hegel is important” won’t do, nor is it sufficient to give in to what Jameson calls “the tripartite temptation” (2010: 19) and reduce the Hegelian dialectic to the old “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” formula á la the earlier footnote, since Hegel himself never described his own sense of the dialectic quite so formulaically and in fact chafed against the limitations of this Fichtean trinity.3 If we had to boil Hegel’s thinking down to a single term, other than “dialectic”—and other than “restlessness,” which was, as Jameson notes, “one of Hegel’s favorite words” (2010: 21)—that term would probably have to be Aufhebung, or “sublation.” But in attempting to do that particular word justice we very quickly see our discursive pot boil over, saturating just about “everything” in sight. For in the Science of Logic, Hegel asserts that Aufhebung or sublation “constitutes one of the most important notions in philosophy”

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Take this synthesis and shove it!: In Emancipation After Hegel, Todd McGowan writes that “it would be nice if we could explain Hegel’s philosophy by simply repeating the mantra ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis.’ Not only does it make the notoriously difficult Hegel easier to understand, but it also provides a comforting image of how conflicts and contradictions end up working out. Unfortunately, everyone who knows anything about Hegel knows that the popular view of his thought as a movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis is nothing but a caricature” (2019: 11). Jameson calls the thesis-antithesissynthesis formula “one of the most notorious and inveterate stereotypes of Hegel discussion,” though he allows that Hegel himself “is complicitous in the propagation of this formula, and at least partially responsible for its vulgarization. It is certainly a useful teaching device as well as a convenient expository framework: and is thereby called upon to play its role in that transformation of Hegel’s thought into a systematic philosophy— into Hegelianism, if you will. . . . [But] even if the tripartite rhythm happens to do justice to this or that local Hegelian insight, it still reifies that insight in advance and translates its language into purely systematic terms. . . . Yet the tripartite temptation does not appear out of nowhere, nor does it correspond to nothing [in Hegel] at all. Indeed, it might be considered a relatively awkward codification of what is certainly a far more consistent and coherent Hegelian view of human time, which governs the growth of the individual (Bildung) fully as much as the development of history itself ” (2010: 18–19). As for the Fichtean origins of the “tripartite temptation,” Yirmiyahu Yovel writes that for Hegel dialectical logic “cannot be formalized, not even by the famous formula ‘thesis-antithesissynthesis’ (which is Fichte’s, not Hegel’s). . . . Fichte constructed his system by triads of the form ‘thesis-antithesis-synthesis,’ which repeat themselves throughout his systematic work, The Theory of Science, as an a priori formula. Though Hegel refrains from using this formula, it has nevertheless been ascribed to him in many textbooks and in the public’s mind. It is true that Hegel’s system, in its broad lines, also advances a triadic form, but it is different, freer, and without a priori formulaic limitations” (2005: 29). Yovel goes on to suggest that the slogan “ ‘Self-reflection in being-other’ is perhaps Hegel’s most succinct formulation of a dialectical relation . . . Although the dialectic cannot be squeezed into an a priori formula, when a short characterization is needed, we might prefer to speak of ‘self-reflection within otherness’ instead of the problematic formula ‘thesis-antithesissynthesis’ ” (2005: 99).

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(1812/1998: 194). The word, he writes, has “a twofold meaning,” and its duplicity actually constitutes its dialectical operation: “on the one hand [to sublate] means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put to an end” (1812/1998: 194). These two “folds” of meaning of course seem mutually opposed, hopelessly contradictory, for how can anything be simultaneously maintained and put to an end? But this contradiction, inherent to Aufhebung, allows us to consider one of Hegel’s most Hegelian premises: to wit, “everything is inherently contradictory” (1812/1998: 238). And by “everything” Hegel does mean absolutely everything, for in his book there is nothing, nothing in heaven or in nature or mind or anywhere else which does not equally contain both immediacy and mediation, so that these two determinations reveal themselves to be unseparated and inseparable and the opposition between them to be a nullity” (1812/1998: 178).

So here our questions become: how does this two-fold meaning of Aufhebung—to cancel and equally to preserve—relate to the assertion that everything everywhere is contradictory in that there is nothing anywhere that doesn’t equally contain both immediacy and mediation? What do “immediacy and mediation” even mean for Hegel, and why is it so important for him that we nullify their opposition? Why is Yovel correct to say that “absolute immediacy is a myth for Hegel” (2005: 48)? Why is Jameson correct to say that “the whole of Hegel’s philosophical production is an elaborate refutation of all possible concepts of immediacy” (2010: 13)? For Hegel, writes Michael Inwood, “The immediate is unrelated to other things; simple; given; elementary; and/or initial. The mediated, by contrast, is related to other things; complex; explained; developed; and/or resultant” (1992: 184). Thus, for Hegel, developing the understanding that “everything is inherently contradictory” entails both grasping and revealing the inseparability, within the orbit of “everything,” of apparent immediacy and actual mediation; it means negating the apparent opposition between the two, so that what appears to be isolatedly unrelated to other things is shown to be totally other-related; what seems simple is shown to be complex; what is normally “taken as a given” demonstrably warrants more sustained explanation; what seems elementary is drawn into secondary, tertiary, and further spirals of rhetorical development; what initially appears to our historical (or “onto-theological”) imagination as an absolutely self-identical origin is posited instead as a mixed and derived result. “Down-to-earth” examples of all this are forthcoming, but for now let’s just say that this revelation—of and as the developmental nullification of

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opposites—is the conceptual work of sublation and that in Hegel’s work it is this work that ultimately works through (without entirely resolving) the contradiction embedded in Aufhebung. For in Hegel’s view mediation “refutes” but doesn’t simply annihilate immediacy; rather, mediation dissolves the immediate in its given form and perpetually transforms the immediate into something other than itself. The given or familiar form is “sublated” rather than destroyed to the extent that something in the form that is essential to the form survives its mediation/transformation into something external to and “alienated” from itself, retaining “something in and of itself ” without “selfrighteously” resisting self-estrangement. This recourse to self-alienation as destructive transformation explains how sublation equally cancels and preserves. The conceptual work of Aufhebung consists of grasping the “truth” that “everything is inherently contradictory” in that “everything” that really “is” only potentially “is”; that is, everything that “is” truly is, absolutely is, only by virtue of going through the dialectical process of remaining itself (or “winning its truth”) by becoming (for a moment, or for an ever-extended series of moments) the negative of itself, and that nothing—not even “nothing”—can exempt itself from getting “caught up” in the “truth,” the “revealed reality,” of this universally transformational “sequence of forms.” As Hegel posits: The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself. (1807/1998: 53)

Now, Hegel turns that loaded phrase “everything is inherently contradictory” in the section of the Science of Logic called “Doctrine of Essence,” and the phrase pops up at a moment in Hegel’s exposition that finds him challenging the stale and prejudiced notion that immediate “identity” constitutes the most profound “essence” of “being.” As Hegel writes: It is one of the fundamental prejudices of logic as hitherto understood and of ordinary thinking, that contradiction is not so characteristically essential and immanent a determination as identity; but in fact, if it were a question of grading the two determinations . . ., then contradiction would have to be taken as the profounder determination and more characteristic of essence. For as against contradiction, identity is merely the determination of the simple immediate, of dead being; but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far

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as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and an activity. (1812/1998: 238).4

In other words: If Aufhebung is inherently contradictory, duplicitous in its unfolding, then so is “everything” else—or at least everything else that in actuality does unfold, that actually does move, that isn’t “dead being,” fixed in the immediate “givenness” of determinately self-contained identity. Any “being” that remains fixed maintains the boundaries of its formal necrosis by shrinking from mediation, shirking the spiritual duty of self-alienation, refusing to face up to what its own inherent contradictions imply and potentially express. The difference, then, between “identity” and “contradiction” is for Hegel the difference between an ever-self-enclosed hypostasis and an ever-expanding expression of self-alienating movement. The principle of self-movement . . . consists solely in an exhibition of it. External, sensuous motion itself is contradiction’s immediate existence. Something moves, not because at one moment it is here and at another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this ‘here’, it at once is and is not. (1812/1998: 239)5

What Hegel calls “livingness,” then—animation or Spirit—is self-movement as “existent contradiction itself ” (1812/1998: 239). Any “being” that exists, that animatedly is “is, in one and the same respect, self-contained and deficient, the negative of itself” (1812/1998: 239). What Hegel on the other hand calls “abstract self-identity” remains fixed “in itself,” and it remains fixed because of its rock-steady refusal to acknowledge its inner deficiency, because of its

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McGowan writes that “the central contention of Hegel’s philosophy [is] that being itself is contradictory and that we have the capacity to apprehend this contradiction by thinking. Rather than trying to eliminate contradiction, subjects attempt to sustain and further it. Contradiction is not anathema to thought but what animates both thought and being” (2019: 6). Because theorists like Žižek see Hegel’s dialectic as anticipating and making possible Lacan’s “antiphysical” take on language, because Žižek believes that “the Hegelian dialectic begins with a chasm opened up between words and things” (Johnston 2008: 263), it’s interesting to note the similarity between what Hegel says here about “the principle of self-movement” and what we earlier saw Lacan say about the movement of the signifier: “The signifier is a unique unit of being which, by its very nature, is the symbol of but an absence. This is why we cannot say of the [signifier] that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes” (Lacan 1966a/2006:17). For more on Hegel’s anticipations of psychoanalysis, see Mills (2002), the chapter called “Hegel After Freud” in McGowan’s Emancipation After Hegel, and pretty much everything Žižek ever wrote.

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failure to fail to be itself, its inability to let go of itself, to realize itself in and as the negative of itself. Thus: Abstract self-identity is not yet a livingness, but the positive, being in its own self a negativity, goes outside itself and undergoes alteration. Something is therefore alive only in so far as it contains contradiction within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradiction. (1812/1998: 239)

This power to endure contradiction, to hold on to letting go—this capability of Spirit to give up “the fixity of its self-positing” (1807/1998: 60), to get outside its own tightly clenched circle and submit itself to alteration—is what Hegel calls negating negativity, “the activity of dissolution,” “the tremendous power of the negative” (1807/1998: 59), and so on. But this tremendously negative power is actually nothing but subjective “Understanding” as the self-moving/self-dissolving force of mediation. In Hegel’s understanding, Understanding means (or at least potentially means) much more than ideational consumption, more than simply “taking in” existing thoughts and representations “as given”; rather, Understanding entails the arduous work of “freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity,” a liberatory work that imparts “spiritual life” (1807/1998: 60) to both the Understanding subject and the “substantial” matters understood.6 6

I use the word “Understanding” here because it’s the word Hegel uses in the famous passage from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit that you’re just about to read. But it’s actually a bit misleading to let the word “Understanding” signify the “power and work” of active thinking that Hegel advocates, for typically Hegel lets Verstand or “Understanding” stand for exactly the type of ideational consumption—the passive “taking in” of thoughts in their empirical, given, common-sense, or reified form—that is described above. Indeed, “If the strictest formulations of the dialectic often inspire perplexity, annoyance, and refusal, it is because . . . these formulations . . . wish to make understood that they cannot be, as they are, understood by understanding, but rather demand that understanding relinquish itself ” (Nancy 2002: 63). For Hegel, effectively dialectical thinking should be understood as the self-overcoming of “Understanding,” a relinquishing sublation of certainty and of empiricist common-sense. Thus Jameson writes that in Hegel’s work “the great movement from Verstand or Understanding to Vernunft or Reason is grasped as a radical break with common-sense empiricism and with what we may also call reified thinking” (2010: 1), which is why I write that in Hegel’s understanding “Understanding” only potentially means something more and other than passive or reified ideational consumption: Understanding, that is, has the potential to radically break with itself, to relinquish itself, but to enact this potential Understanding must “enthusiastically embrace the power of negativity introduced into reality through the internal rupturing of the idiotic, sterile enclosure of consciousness as solipsistic sense-certainty” (Johnston 2008: 263). Without embracing “the power of negativity,” which is the power of Understanding itself, Understanding will never become more and other than itself, will never become Reason, will remain nothing other than exactly itself, rigidly if not “idiotically” self-identical.

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And yet, rather astonishingly, this beneficently and creatively “spiritual life” is for Hegel inseparable from the destructive work of death and dismemberment. In a particularly famous moment in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes: The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that remains self-enclosed and . . . holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it . . . should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’. Death, if that is what we want to call this nonactuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength . . . But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself . . . Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with . . . the Subject, which . . . supersedes abstract immediacy . . . and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself. (1807/1998: 59)

Earlier, in what has been called “the single most important sentence in the Preface” (Yovel 2005: 16), Hegel writes that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (1807/1998: 52). Hegel also posits that the fact “that the True is actual only as system, or that Substance is essentially Subject, is expressed in the representation of the Absolute as Spirit” (1807/1998: 55). We can best understand what Hegel means by these terms by considering “Subject” as self-consciousness (never mind for the moment whose) and “Substance” as everything supposedly external or alien to self-consciousness; we could also understand “Subject” as “Spirit” or “Mind” and “Substance” as stuff, objective “Matter.” At first glance, or for what Hegel calls “ordinary thinking,” it would seem that these two “determinations” or definitions are absolutely opposed, that one is the simple negative of the other, that Spirit is the pure “non-actuality” of Matter, or that Subject is completely alien to Substance—or, if you like, that the “I” differs utterly and eternally (not to mention sexually and/or racially) from the “not-I” (though we will be mentioning those now merely “parenthetical”

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matters later on). But for Hegel, grasping the True in its totality means realizing that Subject/Spirit “truly is” only through its developmental actuation or substantiation. Only through the “overcoming of alienation” (1807/1998: 56) does “Subject” essentially become “Substance” while remaining substantially Subject. Only through Spirit’s eventual realization of “pure self-recognition in absolute otherness” (1807/1998: 56) does inert exteriority become “authentic substance” for, of, and as the Subject of “Absolute Knowing.”

II: Antithesis But what’s the deal with “Absolute Knowing”? Since for Hegel “the True is the whole,” it would follow that the “absolutely true” must be “absolutely whole.” But for Hegel nothing can be true or whole without its being consciously and rationally grasped to be so. Thus the “Absolute” can truly be, can totally be, only as the result of the rational Subject’s Substantially and self-consciously becoming itself, wholly overcoming its self-estrangement and knowing it, “becom[ing] alienated from itself and then return[ing] to itself from this alienation” (1807/1998: 61). This absolutely “totalizing” or completely “heterotautological” take on Truth can allow readers of Hegel to take this philosopher either as a wholly progressive secular teleological rationalist for whom human “reason rules the world” (1837/1998: 408) or as a residually holy-roller Christian eschatologist for whom good old “God” still calls the shots— depending on how one deals with the question of to whom or to what Power “self-consciousness” as “Absolute Knowing” finally and properly belongs, or depending on whether one takes one’s Spirits phenomenologically, ontotheologically, historico-collectively, and/or as a card-carrying Lacanian.7 7

“Telos is the Greek word for ‘end’ or ‘goal,’ and a teleology or teleological argument assigns meaning to events by viewing them as progressing toward a goal . . . Many of the most influential philosophies of history in Western thought have been teleological (as is, for example, Christian theology or the philosophy of Hegel)” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 302). Eschatology is the branch of Christian theology concerned with future or final events. Phenomenology (once again) involves the analysis of “human consciousness as ‘lived experience’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 227) and is usually associated with “the canonical three H’s of German philosophy” (Rabaté 2002: 47): Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. The term onto-theological hails from Heidegger and involves his faulting Western metaphysics for limiting the thinking of being (ontos) to the idea of God (theos) and vice-versa. Derrida offers the term “hetero-tautology” as “the definition of the Hegelian speculative” (1988: 301), casting Hegel’s “Spirit” as “self-recognition in absolute otherness” as a teleological/tautological/totalitarian process of always turning “the other” back into “the same.” In distinction to all this, Jameson takes Hegel’s “Spirit” to mean the “social collectivity” of human history—the socio-historical or untranscendably human

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We will return to these questions. But for the moment let’s get back to Aufhebung. I’ve said that its duplicitous unfolding is the operation of the dialectic. And although I’ve acknowledged that the three-step formula “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” is a sorry way to describe that operation, I will now employ the heuristic formula anyway—after all, as Jameson allows, it’s “a useful teaching device” (2010: 18)—in order to draw out several versions of “the Hegelian sequence of forms,” one abstractly logical, the other comedically theological, and the third collectively world-historical. In the Science of Logic, Hegel posits that it is impossible to think of the thing or thesis called “being” without also thinking of its non-thing, its antithesis, so-called “nothing.” More to the point, Hegel posits the impossibility of thinking “being” itself, “beingness” as such, or “being” in general, without also thinking of its opposite, the antithetical thought of “nothing” in particular. This “nothing in particular” is summoned to the thinking (of) being only to be excluded from it: it appears only to disappear as the simple, immediate antithesis of “being in general,”“being as such.” But Hegel, being Hegel, cannot rest content to allow a determination and its negation—in this case, “being” and “nothing”—to settle down into a comfortably fixed or “indifferent” opposition. Understanding that “being” and “nothing” already infect each other, that “nothing in particular” negates nothing but “being” in general and thus properly belongs to “being” as being’s property, its own proper negation, Hegel posits becoming as the mo(ve)ment of mediation between simple

collective of laboring world-makers in the Marxist or materialist sense. Jameson insists that “we can disambiguate Hegel’s discussions by holding firm to the principle that the words Spirit or Geist, wherever they appear, have nothing to do with spirituality nor even with consciousness itself as such. . . . [Rather], we must . . . hold firmly to the conviction that in Hegel the word ‘Spirit’ always designates the collective” (2010: 13). Žižek—who likes to call himself a “card-carrying Lacanian”—views Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing” not as an all-encompassing grab-bag of final and stable philosophical Truth, nor (even though he’s Marxist) as the full achievement of a classless society, but rather in the Lacanian “Spirit” of radical loss: Adrian Johnston writes that “as Žižek sees it, Hegel’s notorious ‘absolute knowledge’ (das absolute Wissen) amounts to nothing more than the acceptance of the irreducible incompleteness not only of the subjective human understanding of the world . . . but also of the reality of being and of itself. Žižek describes das absolute Wissen as involving an experience of ‘radical loss,’ rather than an intoxicating ascension into omniscience.” For Žižek, writes Johnston, “the dialectic arguably involves an insight into the interminability of the restless dialectic movement . . . instead of marking a point at which a stable body of knowledge is consolidated once and for all” (2008: 130–1). As Johnston continues: “According to Žižekian Hegelianism, the Absolute is the absolutely finite. Reaching the vantage point of the Absolute amounts to realizing that there’s no seamless transcendent Elsewhere in which the snags and tears in the fabric of experiential reality are magically mended” (2008: 132). One might more rudely assert that “reaching the vantage point of the Absolute amounts to realizing” that “everything is inherently contradictory” means that everything and everyone is absolutely fucked.

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“being” and pure “nothing.” In this mediation “being and nothing each become the other, and so constitute the concept of becoming. Becoming . . . is the ‘unity’ of . . . both being and nothing, in that becoming is [both] the coming to be of what was not [and] the ceasing to be of what was” (Inwood 1992: 45). As Adrian Johnston ably explains: For Hegel, the movement of becoming is a result of the inextricable intertwining of being and nothing. In other words, Hegelian becoming is simultaneously the dynamic of being passing into nothing and of nothing passing into being. This two-way dynamic is driven by, among other factors, temporal negativity. The unstoppable movement of time is the passage of nothing into being that forced being to pass into nothing by negating any and every congealed configuration of being(s). . . . Hegel’s ontology is one in which all actually existing things are crystallized objectifications of the antagonism between being and nothing. Everything with actual ontological status is in a state of becoming as a materialization of the dialectical oscillation between being and nothing. Consequently, in this ontology, there is neither brute being as inert raw matter (i.e., subjectless substance) nor pure nothing as entirely dematerialized negativity (i.e., substanceless subject)—substance always involves the subject and vice-versa. . . . As Hegel repeats, all of existence is an “impure” admixture of these abstract poles: “Nowhere in heaven and earth is there anything which does not contain within itself both being and nothing” (Hegel 1969, 85), and correlatively but conversely, nowhere in heaven or on earth is there being by itself or nothing by itself. And again, he maintains that “there is nothing which is not in an intermediate state between being and nothing” (Hegel 1969, 105). (Johnston 2008: 239–40)

A hell of a long quotation, to be sure: but note in passing how here as elsewhere in the Science of Logic Hegel simultaneously introduces and negates the opposition between being(s) “in heaven or on earth.” Note too how Johnston can pull off his impressive unpacking of the “the dialectical oscillation between being and nothing” without giving in to the “tripartite temptation.” If we were to yield to that temptation, however, and map the “abstract poles” of this Hegelian “admixture” onto the heuristic formula of the dialectic, we would (reductively) posit “being” as thesis, “nothing” as antithesis, and “becoming” as synthesis, the negation of the negation. But we would also stress that what keeps this or any other dialectical ball rolling is the conviction that any synthesis must be considered a new thesis precipitating yet another antithesis, thereby generating the next stage of dialectical synthesis, which becomes a new but restlessly self-contradictory thesis, and so on.

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But to see how this transformative sequencing works in less abstractly logical and more “down to earth” terms, let me ask you a question that’s out of this world. Are you, by any chance, “God”? No, I didn’t think so. And I hope and trust you didn’t say so. But if you did answer that question sanely, then, believe it or not, you manifested something like Hegelian negation, for, as Inwood notes, “The native German for ‘negation’ is Verneinung, from verneinen (‘to answer “No” (nein) to a question, to deny or contradict an assertion’)” (1992: 199). Thus, by rationally answering “no” to the crazy-ass question—“are you ‘God’?”—you effectively posit yourself as the negation of God, as God’s antithesis, as “bad” as that might initially sound. And it sounds even worse before it starts to sound better. For if “you” stand as the negation of “God,” how then stands “God”? Rather unsteadily, as it turns out, at least in Hegel’s actively dissolvent Understanding. For Hegel really means it when he writes that “everything is inherently contradictory” and that there is “nothing in heaven or in nature or mind or anywhere else” that isn’t a mix of immediacy and mediation, of being and nothing, including even “God.” But how the hell could “God” possibly be brought down into this dissolute mixture? How can even “God,” the very fixture of the Absolute, be posited as an inherently contradictory being that (even up “in heaven”) unfixedly stands on the unstable grounds of Aufhebung? Well, consider the standard attributes of the Absolute Being in our “ordinary thinking.” Conventionally, belief in “God” is staked on the conception of a Deity that/who transcends all human limits, that/who is immortal and omniscient, that/who doesn’t gain power as He merrily rolls along but is “all-powerful” from the foundational get-go. But a moment’s reflection on these “essential” attributes shakes them all up, brings them into trembling contradiction. Immortality, for example, clashes with omniscience, for, strangely enough, an immortal being can’t know what it feels like to be consciously mortal, to be conscious of mortality, suffering through the actual lived experience of the anticipation of death. Being absolutely all-powerful also abrades omniscience, for an infinitely almighty and exalted being just can’t know what it really feels like in actual lived experience to be puny, powerless, ignominious, forsaken—just a slob, a bum, a loser. Omniscience alone is shot through with irony, for the omniscient can’t know what it really feels like not to know, which means that the omniscient is by definition limited in knowledge. Paradoxically, then, the omniscient “God” who already knows everything, already knows how it’s all going to turn out (at, say, the end of time), thereby lacks something that we mere mortals sometimes possess in abundance, and I don’t mean ignorance. Rather—and you might already have guessed where this irony is headed (God knows I’ve planted enough clues)—

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the Absolutely Omniscient must by definition lack curiosity, even the curiosity that killed the cat. What say we yield once more to tripartite temptation and take this bizarre notion of an inherently self-contradictory and strangely deficient “God”—a “God” put weirdly at a deficit in knowledge by the very virtue of omniscience— back to the stereotypical formula? “God” would be the thesis, and, as we’ve established, you and your ilk would be the antithesis, the negation of “God.” Now, the “Almighty God” of some old-time religion might be content to rest or ineffably abide on the safe side of this fixed opposition. But that old-time (or Old Testament) religion (i.e., Judaism) isn’t good enough for Hegel. Nor is such divine self-sufficiency good enough for the “deficient” God of the new and “true” religion, for the self-sacrificial Spirit that can “win its truth” only by losing/finding itself in utter dismemberment. To the extent that selfconsciousness of and as inherent contradiction prods this “deficient” God into “the restlessness of the negative,” this self-prodded God desires to overcome the contradiction, to nullify the opposition, between its own divine thesis and your all-too-human antithesis. This restless and infinitely Understanding Spirit not only has a desire but essentially is this desire to negate the negation by undergoing alteration and becoming something other than itself, by coming down to your level, by actually becoming one of you (no small sacrifice on the Deity’s part, you might agree). Only through this sacrificial process can Spirit as self-lowered Lord succeed in “winning its truth” and (if you do agree) winning you over, winning all of you who are in agreement over, or back, if not at the same time, then at the end of time, to be (rapturously) sure. Perhaps, then, the least that can be said about Hegel is simply “Jesus Christ!”8

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Jameson notes that Hegel’s early writings are concerned with the theological concept of the Trinity, and writes that “the formal similarities of the tripartite dialectic with the theological interpretation of the Trinity have led many interpreters either to locate the origins of the dialectic in these theological reflections or else pronounce Hegel a Christian thinker without further ado” (2010: 120). Yovel notes that “religious interpreters have argued that Hegel gives theology precedence over philosophy because of the structural analogy between dialectical logic and the Christian trinity” (2005: 13). Both Jameson and Yovel believe that “such hermeneutical moves are dubious” (Yovel 2005: 13). McGowan, on the other hand, believes that Hegel’s “investment in Christianity . . . provides the linchpin for [his] theory of emancipation” and that “once one subtracts Christianity . . . from Hegel’s thought, one loses sight of the freedom that his philosophy offers” (2019: 3). Concurring with Hägglund’s take on Hegel in This Life, I would say that unless Hegel’s or anyone else’s “investment in Christianity” is allowed to flourish into a purely democratic “secular faith,” no real “spiritual freedom” is being offered, that any “liberation theology” that doesn’t aim at liberation from theology remains indentured, however subtly, to heteropatriarchal theocracy. As Hägglund has it: “The Hegelian insight regarding religious practices—that ‘God’ is a name for the communal norms we have

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But of course there’s nothing simple about this moniker, which we can’t just drop in praise or take in vain, hoping to let the expletive hang there as the least or last thing that can be said about Hegel. To stop at this particular station would be both to neglect the ongoing operation of the dialectic and to ignore the way Hegel’s subjectively rationalist philosophy restlessly supersedes whatever remains of his substantially religious faith. But since we do have to stop for a vanishing moment before considering that supersession, let’s “tarry with the negative” for a while in its “totally” Christian form. Simply put, and heuristically employing the “caricature” of the dialectic once again, if God is the thesis and you’re the antithesis, Jesus Christ would have to be the synthesis. But as we’ve noted, any synthesis is supposed to snap into the position of new thesis, generating yet another antithesis. In this case, however, the new antithesis is the same one as before, given that you (if still sane) would no doubt answer “no” to the question “Are you Jesus Christ?” But we can readily see how this contradiction, between you and the Savior of the world, might be sublated, for while you might quite rationally deny being Christ, you might not emotionally deny Christ himself, might not deny “the body of Christ,” “the passion of the Christ,” and you might very well deny that denial by passionately affirming being Christian. But of course when the “true believer,” “the devout Christian,” becomes the figural synthesis of Jesus and the likes of you, all the non-Christianity “out there” pops up as the new antithesis; Operation Dialectics in its totally and exclusively Christian form thus expands into a world-wide evangelical movement, an imperialist/ colonialist missionary crusade that seeks to negate the negation of nonEuropean non-belief by converting (or exterminating) all the brutish nonbelievers. And the absolute finale of this dialectical narrative would be that the Absolute Deity that started the whole show will have finally and totally overcome its own self-estrangement: by submitting itself to “incarnation,” by becoming itself a substantial piece of meat in the very stew of world history that it’s spiritually stirring, by sacrificing itself as flesh and resurrecting itself as Spirit, the Christian Dios con carne lets itself “down” into the material world but eventually brings the “best” of the world “back up” with it (minus, one imagines, the meat). The Deity beats the world’s meat, negates what’s negative, legislated for ourselves—is . . . necessary but not sufficient. To complete our emancipation, we ought to remove all remaining forms of political theology by removing any appeal to ‘God’ in favor of the explicit democratic recognition that what ultimately matters is our relations to one another. The basic premise of political theology has always been that we the people cannot ultimately own the responsibility for our life together. At the end of the day all forms of political theology are antidemocratic, since they assume that we must defer to a higher authority than we the people in order to hold together as a community. The movement toward democratic socialism is thus inseparable from the overcoming of political theology and the withering away of religious faith” (2020: 388–9).

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what’s merely carnal, merely animal or meanly “savage” about or around the world, and reappropriates everything that’s “good” about it to itself—taking it all back up to “heaven” in a cosmically and comedically “hetero-tautological” restoration project. And as for you, who don’t want to be left behind, it’s only by your actively negating what’s “negative” about yourself (i.e., whatever puts you at odds with Jesus, whatever you would do that Jesus wouldn’t)—it’s only by not denying Christ and actually becoming Christian—that you will ever get your sorry self-consciousness hauled back up to heaven. But, good God, is all of this what Hegel, “the inaugural thinker of the contemporary world,” actually believed? To the extent that he considered Christianity the true religion and remained Christian (specifically, Lutheran) in his religious beliefs, sure, why not? But to the extent that (his) philosophical concepts sublate (his) religious beliefs, to the extent that Hegel put his ultimate philosophical faith in the power of human Reason, arguing that “Reason is Spirit when its certainty of being all reality has been raised to truth, and it is conscious of itself as its own world, and of the world as itself ” (1807/1977: 263), to the extent that Hegel is the Enlightenment thinker par excellence, who justified the Enlightenment’s faith in reason’s rule of the world in terms of “the human possession of treasures formerly squandered on heaven” (1795/1948: 159), then, no, not so much.9 According to Inwood, what Hegel generally believes is that “religion and philosophy have the same content . . . but present it in a different form . . ., e.g.

9

“One would think . . .”: “The Enlightenment is one of the common names given to the historical period in Europe encompassing roughly the second half of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century. The word also refers to the major intellectual project of the era, which was described by the philosopher Immanuel Kant as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.’ Thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected superstition and blind faith, extolled reason, and view it as the crucial means of improvement in all areas of human life” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 95). But did Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Hegel actually consider all living humans in their rationalist conceptions of universally improving human life? Not so much. For as Susan Buck-Morss writes at the beginning of her 2009 book Hegel and Haiti: “By the Eighteenth Century, slavery had become the root metaphor of western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations. Freedom, its conceptual antithesis, was considered by Enlightenment thinkers as the highest and universal political value. Yet this political metaphor began to take root at precisely the time that the economic practice of slavery— the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies—was intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mideighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it. This glaring discrepancy between thought and practice marked the period of the transformation of global capitalism from its mercantile to it protoindustrial form. One would think that, surely, no rational, ‘enlightened’ thinker could have failed to notice. But such was not the case” (21–2).

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what Hegel presents, in the higher and more perspicuous form of thought, as the emergence of the logical idea into nature, or the overcoming of our natural urges, etc., is presented by Christianity, in the form of conception, as God’s creating of the world, or the death of Christ.” In Hegel’s view,“philosophy is required to translate the conceptions (or ‘metaphors’) of religion into conceptual thought. Since philosophy involves conceptual thought, it can reflect upon and interpret religion, while religion cannot reflect on or interpret philosophy or, for that matter, art” (1992: 255). If we reflect on philosophy’s required translation of religion in terms of dialectical stages, stages required by the art of the dialectic, then we might see that Christianity, which insists on God’s becoming (for a limited time only) human, sets the stage for Hegelianism, which insists on translating the Christian deity’s historical adventure in self-consciousness into the totally secular story of human Reason’s completely coming into its own, or maybe incompletely coming into its own, but in any case with no more squandering of any treasures on heaven. Hegelianism translates the metaphor of the Messiah’s salvational sojourn into the concept of Human Reason’s progressive self-development into Absolute Knowing. You can, in other words, blame Jesus, blame the Absolute’s self-sacrificial decision to become an utterly dismembered and ignominious “one of us,” for Hegel’s utterly secularizing representation of Reason as Spirit as “the likeness of God, the divinity of man” (in Nancy 2002: 101).10

III: Ecce Homo But speaking of “man,” and of bringing Hegel completely “down to earth,” speaking, as Marx does, of standing Hegel on his feet rather than on his idealist head and of revealing the “rational kernel” within the dialectic’s “mystical shell” (1873/1978: 302), speaking of bringing the de-deified dialectic to bear on a specifically secular moment in what Hegel calls “world history [as] the progress of the consciousness of freedom” (1837/1998: 402), let’s consider an actual historical scene, a well-known documentary photograph of sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee, USA, 1968.

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In Emancipation After Hegel, McGowan writes that Hegel’s “philosophy of contradiction has its origin in the revolutionary act of God dying on the cross. Hegel is the first thinker to see the profundity of the transformation that Christianity inaugurates. When the infinite reveals itself as ignominious, we know that nothing is free of contradiction” (2019: 10). And with that quote I hereby emancipate myself from feeling the need to make any further mention of Hegel’s investment in Christianity.

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This famous photograph depicts a row of marching men confronted by a column of standing men. The marching men are the striking sanitation workers, restlessly agitating for non-dehumanizing working conditions; the standing men are the state militia, positioned to control, contain, disperse, perhaps even dutifully murder the restless agitators. Except for one conspicuous bearded white guy, each of the marching men is an AfricanAmerican man and thus presumably a descendant of human beings once held in slavery in the American South. With no discernible exception, each of the soldiers is a white man and thus presumably descendent from men who once enjoyed positions of mastery, who bought and sold other human beings and/or fought to the death to protect the institution of slavery in the American South. Apparently still employed for institutional protection, each of the standing white soldiers carries a rifle with a fixed bayonet. Demonstrably desiring institutional transformation, each of the marching black strikers carries a sign that bears this message: I AM A MAN. Now, to address the question of what’s “Hegelian” about this scenario, we have to ask what moves a male human being to make this particular claim—I AM A MAN—at this particular moment in history, at the point of these loaded guns and sharpened knives, at the risk of his manhood, of his very life. What moves an individual to put his life, his given (biologically male) body, on the line in order to bear a slogan that in other historical circumstances or for other individual men could well be taken as a given, held as an obvious fact, a self-evident truth? And what’s the difference between the apparently unnecessary assertion of self-evident maleness and the individual male marcher’s claim—apparently made necessary by world history as the progress of the self-consciousness of freedom—to be more than merely male, not an animal, and not a “boy,” but actually a man?11 11

The Memphis sanitation workers were reportedly often referred to as animals— specifically, as “walking vultures.” And it is well-known that fully grown AfricanAmerican men were routinely called “boys,” and not simply in the American South. For example, consider the line in the 1942 film Casablanca in which Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) casually refers to Sam (Dooley Wilson, then aged 56) as “the boy playing the piano.” The irony is that Ilsa, her husband Victor (Paul Henreid), and of course Sam’s boss and Ilsa’s lover Rick (Humphrey Bogart) are all supposed to be united against the Nazis, particularly the odious Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt). But if you consider Staples (2017) and Whitman (2017), it might seem that the writers who gave Ilsa the “boy playing the piano” line put her more squarely on the side of Major Strasser. Though I would stop short of suggesting that they thus made Casablanca a prequel to the 1975 exploitation film Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS , I’ll note what I would take to be an Afropessimism-generating correspondence between Rick’s famous “We’ll always have Paris” and the last words of the head “house-slave” Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) in Quentin Tarantino’s 2013 Django Unchained, just before the enslaver’s plantation, called “Candyland,” gets blown uppity by the “uppity” Django Freeman (Jamie Foxx)—to wit: “You can’t destroy Candyland! There’s always gonna be a Candyland!” For more on Django, see Speck (2014).

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Let’s say that the sentiment behind the marcher’s sign I AM A MAN can never, has never, simply gone without saying. For: Man is Self-Consciousness. He is conscious of himself, conscious of his human reality and dignity; and it is in this that he is essentially different from animals, which do not go beyond the level of simple Sentiment of self. Man becomes first conscious of himself at the moment when—for the “first” time—he says “I.” To understand man by understanding his “origin” is, therefore, to understand the origin of the I revealed by speech. (Kojève 1947/1980: 3)

These are the opening words of a speech, an introductory lecture on Hegel, given by the Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève in Paris in the 1930s. More specifically, the lecture is a “translation with commentary” of the section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit entitled “Autonomy and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Mastery and Slavery” (or “Lordship and Bondage”). Hegel himself begins that section with the claim that “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged” (1807/1998: 92). And so Lacan, one of the French intellectual luminaries who attended Kojève’s lectures, is recognizably waxing Hegelian when he claims that the claim “ ‘I [am] a man’ . . . can mean no more than, ‘I’m like the person who, in recognizing him to be a man, I constitute as someone who can recognize me as a man’ ” (1966c/2006:96). Now, what do we recognize these Hegelian “speeches” to mean? What do they reveal about the “I” revealed by the “speech” of the striking sanitation worker on the mean streets of Memphis, 1968, who self-consciously puts his body on the line, his life at risk, in order to recognize himself being recognized as being a man, an I, and not your not-I?12 What does Hegel’s famous “masterslave dialectic” tell us about this literally life-risking first-person speech?13

12

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I can’t help but note the way this line about being recognized as “an I, and not your not-I,” written around 2012, resonates with the title of Raoul Peck’s 2016 film about James Baldwin: I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO. The risk to life was quite real, for Dr. Martin Luther King travelled to Memphis to give his support to the sanitation workers’ strike and was assassinated there on April 4, 1968. I will say more about this date anon. Here I’ll note that while this lesson focusses on Kojève’s take, there are probably as many different interpretations of Hegel’s “masterslave dialectic” as there are serious readers of Hegel. In Hegel and Haiti, for example, the social theorist Susan Buck-Morss marks Hegel as a reader not only of earlier philosophers but of contemporary newspapers in order to situate “the development of Hegel’s idea of the master-slave dialectic within the historical context of the Haitian Revolution” (2009:

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In Kojève’s telling, the master-slave story begins with the encounter of two beings who would be persons. Each wants from the other the same thing: to be recognized as being more than a thing, more than an animal. Each already recognizes its own value to itself, already possesses more than an animal “sentiment of self,” and pretty much knows it, but each also recognizes that it needs the other to recognize the same. Thus neither can “rest content” with its own private or immediate self-consciousness of its value, and so each must impose its desire for recognition upon the other. Each has recognized that “the supreme value for an animal is [only the preservation of] its animal life” and therefore that a “man’s humanity ‘comes to light’ only if he risks his (animal) life for the sake of his human Desire” (Kojève 1947/1980: 7)—i.e., the desire for recognition. It is in and by this risk that the human reality is created and revealed as reality; it is in and by this risk that it “comes to light,” i.e., is shown, demonstrated, verified, and gives proof of being essentially different from the animal, natural reality . . . Man’s humanity “comes to light” only in risking his life to satisfy his human Desire [for recognition]—that is, his Desire [for recognition] directed toward another Desire [for recognition]. (Kojève 1947/1980: 7)

Now, if human reality were always already a freely cooperative and egalitarian society, a “risk-free” peaceable kingdom rather than a risky historical business, then our two proto-protagonists would always already safely and effortlessly “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (1807/1998: 93), as Hegel describes the ideal scenario. But since human reality isn’t a mutual recognition society from the egalitarian get-go, since we have to “battle for

52). She cites Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (a source text for Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck’s 2019 Exterminate All the Brutes!) to the effect that the Haitian Revolution “ ‘entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable even as it happened’ ” (2009: 50), and she writes that when it comes to question of what Hegel might have been thinking (about the unthinkable) when he was writing the Phenomenology “We are left with only two alternatives. Either Hegel was the blindest of all the blind philosophers in Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the print right in front of his face at the breakfast table); or Hegel knew—knew about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters, and he elaborated his dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context” (2009: 50). In The Birth of Theory, however, the medievalist Andrew Cole argues that Hegel’s Herr and Knecht mean Lord and Bondsman, wants to restrict the realest, most historical meaning of that duo’s dialectic to the context of economic relations in feudal agrarian Germany, and thinks that most of what Hegel has to say in his Phenomenology has little or nothing to do with racialized slavery or revolutionary resistance to it in Haiti or anywhere else.

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the creation of a human world that is a world of reciprocal recognition,” as Fanon puts it, human reality must begin with and as a “fight to the death for pure prestige”—a fight for the honor or distinction of being human—a struggle without which “there never would have been human beings on earth” (Kojève 1947/1980: 7). A human being can be formed only if at least two [would-be human] Desires confront one another. Each of the two beings endowed with such a Desire is ready to go all the way in pursuit of its satisfaction; that is, is ready to risk its life—and, consequently, to put the life of the other in danger—in order to be “recognized” by the other, to impose itself on the other as the supreme value [to be the man]; accordingly, their meeting can only be a fight to the death. (Kojève 1947/1980: 7)

So, instead of there being two beings who mutually recognize themselves in each other as “fellow human beings,” we have this anthropogenetic agon in which one brays “I’m the man” to the other’s “No, I’m the man.” But this stubborn fight for prestige, this struggle “to be the man,” can’t actually be a fight to the literal death, for if one man kills the other then the potential source of the desired recognition is obliterated, and if the other goes all the way and croaks for the cause of recognition then there’s nothing but a memory left to be recognized (or erased). So what must happen is that one combatant must inexorably impose himself on the other to the extent that the other gives in to his fear of death, gives up risking his life, lets the need for preservation win out over the desire for recognition, and in effect says, “OK, OK, fine, you’re the man; you take history by the reins—I’ll just hold on to my merely animal life, such as it is, if you don’t mind.” And of course the other doesn’t mind at all, for the immediate result of this abject surrender is that the victor becomes Lord and Master, while the vanquished other becomes his Slave. But the great irony here is that the Lord, the immediate winner, turns out to be the ultimate loser, the glorious chump of the world-historical process. For the immediate winner wins only self-certain Mastery, not the true knowledge of freedom, the absolute knowing that can be attained only through the ironic process of having been a Slave. It’s the Master who really gets screwed here, because even though he garners the recognition he originally desired, he gets this recognition only from someone he can’t recognize as an equal, the Slave. Nor does he win even the resemblance of independence (i.e., prestige), for he obviously depends on both the Slave’s recognition (which has no value for him) and (more importantly) on the Slave’s labor, for the very enjoyment of his Mastery. The Master thus screws

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himself into the “existential impasse” (Kojève 1947/1980: 19) that Hegel calls abstract self-identity, or dead being. “The Master is fixed in his Mastery. He cannot go beyond himself, change, progress” (Kojève 1947/1980: 22). The Master loses any desire to “go beyond” his fixed position because all that lies beyond that fixity seems “beneath” him: the position of the Slave, which he doesn’t want, or death, which he also doesn’t want. So the Master simply sits on his prestigious ass and lets the Slave do the work of “fixing” and bringing him things to consume. Meanwhile, the Slave is working his ass off to fix things for the Master’s consumption, to nourish the Master, to actively produce the Master’s Mastery, to produce the wealth and power, the world with all its fixings, that the Master owns and enjoys. But, crucially, this forced production, this work of actively transforming things in the world (preparing them for the immediate enjoyment of the Master, who doesn’t have to work, and so doesn’t get to change or progress) implies the potentially progressive transformation of everything in this seemingly fixed and given world—including the Slave’s own given position as Slave. Here the Slave’s historical irony obversely mirrors that of the Master’s existential dead-end. The Master first becomes Master by embodying “death, the absolute Lord” (Hegel 1807/1998: 97), by threatening to be death for the Slave, to be the inexorable force negating the Slave’s animal life, only to end up (the Master, that is) abstractly stuck in the “dead being” of a fixed identity. The Slave’s irony, on the other hand, involves his freeing himself from his fix, his enslavement, but he liberates himself only by subjectively internalizing and objectively materializing exactly what he initially feared in the Master: death as the devastating force of negativity or dissolution, death as the tremendous power of the negative. As Kojève tells the “antiphysical” story: The Master forces the Slave to work. And by working, the Slave becomes master of Nature . . . In becoming master of Nature by work, then, the Slave frees himself from his own nature, from his own instinct [the animal-instinctual fear of death] that tied him to Nature and made him the Master’s Slave . . . The future and History hence belong not to the warlike Master, who either dies or preserves himself indefinitely in identity to himself, but to the working Slave. (1947/1980: 22–3) The Master can never detach himself from the World in which he lives, and if this World perishes, he perishes with it . . . Only the Slave can transform the World that forms him and fixes him in slavery and create a world that he has formed in which he will be free . . . In transforming the World by this work, the Slave transforms himself, too, and thus

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creates the new objective conditions that permit him to take up once more the liberating fight for recognition that he refused in the beginning for fear of death. (Kojève 1947/1980: 29–30)

Of course, there’s quite a bit more that could be said about this still ongoing fight for recognition, for liberation, for the creation of new objective conditions, if not for a finally and fully egalitarian human reality, a “fully human and humanly produced world” (Jameson 2010: 107) without Masters or Slaves—or, in Marxist terms, without classes. And indeed it was Marx who stood Hegel on his feet and transformed Hegel’s philosophical narrative of Spirit’s totally overcoming its self-alienation into a fully political story of the social collective’s attempt to overcome its alienated labor and positively annul private property. We will address this form of alienation in the next lesson. But if we limit ourselves here to flying Hegel back to Memphis, we should at least be able to “read” the photograph of the worker’s strike against the warlike masters—those armed myrmidons of white identity, privilege, and prestige—in terms of the classic Hegelian who’s who. Not that Hegel told us, two centuries in advance, everything we need to know to absolutely grasp or capture this image. Nor can we attribute to Hegel himself any “Absolute Knowing” about world history as the progress of the consciousness of freedom, since he was absolutely dumb enough to have considered the African continent a primitive region without history, without any consciousness of freedom, thus without any recognizably human reality whatsoever (and of course a number of European “Enlightenment” thinkers thought about “the dark continent” in much the same way).14 14

Commenting on “Hegel’s pontifications about backward Africans,” Ibram X. Kendi writes that “Hegel failed to free himself and Europe from the Enlightenment era’s racist ideas. ‘It is . . . the concrete universal, self-determining thought, which constitutes the principle and character of Europeans,’ Hegel once wrote. . . . In contrast, African people, he said, were ‘a nation of children’ in the ‘first stage’ of human development: ‘The negro is an example of animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.’ They could be educated [i.e., “civilized,” “Christianized”], but they would never advance on their own. Hegel’s foundational racist idea justified Europe’s ongoing colonization of Africa. European colonizers would supposedly bring progress to Africa’s residents, just as European enslavers had brought progress to Africans in the Americas” (2016: 147–8). Kendi’s source for this discourse is Teshale Tibebu’s 2011 study Hegel and the Third World. And though the following doesn’t specifically concern Hegel, consider what Aimè Cèsaire’s talking about in Discourse on Colonialism when he hears Europeans talking about “progress”: “I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out [by European colonialism]. [. . .] I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life—from life, from the dance, from wisdom” (1955/2000: 43). Note that the indigenous “dance” Césaire mentions here is radically different from the “positive” dancing I’ll be discussing shortly.

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But if, in a spirit of theoretical militancy, “we” can still think of “contemporary history” or the “making of the present” as involving anything resembling progress in the consciousness of freedom, anything resembling the emancipation of democratic understanding, anything resembling a liberatory practice of creativity, then we might still consider Hegel a productively “inaugural thinker” of our “contemporary world.” A “patient reading” of his work might still help us appreciate the distance some regions of the contemporary world have come (or seem to have come): from 1968, and a collective of African-American men risking death and dismemberment to hold up signs saying I AM A MAN, to 2008, and a freely democratic American election that permitted a man of Kenyan descent to raise his right hand and say “I am the President,” or to 2020, and another freely democratic election that allowed a woman of Jamaican and Indian descent to raise her hand and assume the Vice-Presidency of the United States.15 Perhaps the least that can be said about Hegel in our contemporary context is that his restlessly negative reflections might still help us in our attempts to dialectically overcome our own “fundamental prejudices,” our own “ordinary thinking” (1812/1998: 238), our reified “belief in the stability and substantiality of what is” (Jameson 2010: 25), or any other fixities of selfpositing that continue to afflict us. If “Hegel is important,” it may be because his writing continues to provoke the understanding that our “world is precisely what . . . manifests itself as a restlessness” (Nancy 2002: 78). If Hegel is still “close to us,” still “waiting for us” (Foucault 1972: 235), it’s only to the extent that his work remains “an essential step on the way to an understanding” (Rabaté 2002: 21) that “this restlessness is not only ours, it is itself ‘us’ ” (Nancy 2002: 78).

IV: “He positively danced” As noted earlier, in the first footnote in this lesson, Hegel was important to Martin Luther King. According to Hägglund, Hegel was King’s “favorite philosopher” (2020: 351). Also noted earlier is the historical fact that, perhaps in the dialectical spirit of his philosophical favorite, King traveled to Memphis,

15

I’m not mentioning here the years of extreme MAGA reaction that I discussed in the Preface. But for an analysis of the problematic “one-step-forward-two-steps-back” nature of anti-racist progress in the U.S., which includes discussion of the elections of Obama, Agent Orange, and Kamala Harris, see Ibram X. Kendi’s chapter on “Progress” in The 1619 Project.

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Tennessee, USA, to support the sanitation workers’ strike and was assassinated there on April 4, 1968. On the morning of April 5, 1968, I made my way to school. To East Rome Junior High School in Rome, Georgia, USA, where I was enrolled in the seventh grade. Still early that morning, I was standing alone in the schoolyard in front of the brick building, waiting for the doors to be opened and to be admitted sullen entrance, when a kid I knew came running up to me. He was anything but sullen. Indeed, he seemed quite excited about something— exhilarated, if not ecstatic. In fact, “he positively danced.” He put his right hand on my left shoulder and stuck his grinning mug toward mine and gave utterance to himself as follows: “Did’ja hear? Did’ja hear?—They killed the nigger!”

This kid’s last name was actually Crow. I’m sure his first name wasn’t Jim, but I’m going to call him Jim Crow anyway. I’m going to call him Lil’ Jim Crow. And Lil’ Jim Crow wasn’t exactly whispering this announcement. He saw no need to go all sotto voce. He clearly couldn’t have been happier about King’s murder, and he seemed to assume that I shared in his satisfaction that the “nigger” had finally been slain. I don’t remember what, if anything, I said in response. I like to think that I just stared at him. And I like to think that Lil’ Lord Jim quickly sensed that I didn’t feel like dancing and so buzzed off to light on some other classmate more receptive to his glad tidings than was I. What I do remember is that I actually didn’t remember this episode until forty years later, in 2008, upon the aforementioned election of Obama, which victory I like many others took as signifying real if not really Hegelian progress, and that I in particular was pleased to envision as a massive “inyour-face!” to the kid I recalled as Lil’ Jim Crow and to all his ilk’s happily homicidal “heritage.” And I remember calling the episode to mind on other occasions when I yet again found myself “going to school”—that is, driving down Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue and passing the house where King once lived, and the Baptist church where he once preached, en route to the public university where I still teach. And I remember that the first time I attempted to tell this story, and to describe Lil’ Jim Crow’s antics, the phrase “he positively danced” popped into my memory. I knew that these strangely familiar words weren’t of my making, that they must have first appeared in some other narrative I’d read,

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but I wasn’t clear on their actual origin until the next time I found myself teaching Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.16 And, finally, I remember the episode’s coming to mind once again on or around November 8, 2016, when my worst fears about Hegel’s story about world history as “progress in the consciousness of freedom” seemed all too fully realized, and I felt like I was watching all the Lil’ Jim Crows in the world dancing their hideous jigs. It was “not a pretty thing.”

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Six: Aufhebung (sublation), immediacy/mediation, teleology, eschatology, phenomenology, onto-theology, the Enlightenment

16

“It was a celebration”: In that story by Conrad called Heart of Darkness, the narrator, named Marlow, sits cross-legged on the deck of a cruising yawl called the Nellie on a river called the Thames and recounts how during another nautical voyage, up a river called the Congo, one of the well-armed “pilgrims” who’d been indiscriminately exterminating Africans by blindly “squirting lead” from the boat into the forest rushes up to him and expresses himself as follows: “ ‘Say! We must have made a glorious slaughter of them in the bush. Eh? What do you think? Say?’ ” And Marlow says to his auditors on the Nellie, “He positively danced, the bloodthirsty little gingery beggar” (85). But do you know who else “positively danced” to the tune of racial murder? I’ll let Tommy Orange tell you: “Some of us grew up with stories about massacres. Stories about what happened to our people not so long ago. How we came out of it. At Sand Creek, we heard it said that they mowed us down with their howitzers. Volunteer militia under Colonel [and Methodist minister] John Chivington came to kill us—we were mostly women, children, and elders. The men were away to hunt. They’d told us to fly the American flag. We flew that and a white flag too. Surrender, the white flag waved. We stood under both flags as they came at us. They did more than kill us. They tore us up. Mutilated us. Broke our fingers to take our rings, cut off our ears to take our silver, scalped us for our hair. We hid in the hollows of tree trunks, buried ourselves in sand by the riverbank. That same sand ran red with blood. They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies, they ripped them out of our bellies. They broke soft baby heads against trees. Then they took our body parts as trophies and displayed them on a stage in downtown Denver. Colonel Chivington danced with dismembered parts of us in his hands, with women’s pubic hair, drunk, he danced, and the crowd gathered there before him was all the worse for cheering and laughing along with him. It was a celebration” (2019: 8).

Lesson Seven

“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” —or, the fates of literary formalism

I: “not a pretty thing” In chapter 19 of Voltaire’s 1759 novel Candide, the eponymous hero and his companion Cacambo find themselves on the outskirts of the South American town of “Surinam, then belonging to the Dutch.” As they drew near the town, they saw a negro stretched upon the ground, with only one moiety of his clothes, that is, his blue linen drawers; the poor man had lost his left leg and his right hand. “Good God!” said Candide in Dutch, “what art thou doing there, friend, in that shocking condition?” “I am waiting for my master, Mynheer Vanderdendur, the famous merchant,” answered the negro. “Was it Mynheer Vanderdendur,” said Candide, “that treated thee thus?” “Yes, sir,” said the negro, “it is the custom. They give us a pair of linen drawers for our whole garment twice a year. When we work at the sugar canes, and the mill snatches hold of a finger, they cut off the hand; and when we attempt to run away, they cut off the leg; both cases have happened to me. This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe.” (1759/2009: 95–6).1

At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad has his narrator Marlow casually observe that “The conquest of the earth, which mostly

1

For much more about “the price at which you eat sugar,” see Kahlil Gibran Muhammad’s chapter called “Sugar” in The 1619 Project.

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means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (1902/1996: 21). The rest of Conrad’s novel—which follows Marlow into the conquered interior of “the dark continent,” into “the horror” of the brutally exploitative ivory business in the Belgian Congo, to the very edge of Mister Kurtz’s murderous abyss, and then safely back to European “civilization” again—can be read, and has been read, as an explicit dramatization of this ostensibly anti-imperialist and anti-racist observation.2 So that at the novel’s end, when Marlow sits in Brussels, in the comfortable and “lofty drawing-room” of Kurtz’s “intended,” and surveys all the “pretty things” that surround him— The bent gilt legs and back of the furniture shone in indistinct curves. The tall marble fireplace had a cold and monumental whiteness. A grand piano stood massively in a corner; with dark gleams on the flat surfaces like a somber and polished sarcophagus. (1902/1996)

—the ugly point is driven “home” yet again: the “pretty things” of a given civilization aren’t all that pretty, are actually riven with “bloody racist” contradictions, if you look into them “too much,” which is why those who get to enjoy the “pretty things” tend not to look into them very much at all. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we don’t have to look too hard at the “things” produced by monumental white civilization to see much that isn’t pretty. Late in the novel, Denver, the surviving daughter of Sethe—a character based, as Morrison relates in her foreword to the novel, on “the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing

2

The novel has also of course been read otherwise—as a displacement or evasion of Marlow’s observation, as a justification for Anglo-Europeans’ not looking “too much” into the imperialism and colonialism with which Conrad himself—whom Chinua Achebe famously called “a bloody racist” (1978: 9)—is held to be fully complicit. In “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Achebe writes: “Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates this dehumanization, which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art. My answer is: No, it cannot” (1978: 9). For many more interpretations, see Rabinowitz (1996). I myself hardly “celebrate” Conrad’s novel but do frequently teach it (always along with Achebe’s critique) as a text that thematizes its own failure to be an anti-racist intervention, a work of art in which white lies end up mattering much more than Black lives.

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one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner’s plantation” (1987/2004: xvii)—notices a particularly un-pretty thing as she is leaving the house of some “good whitefolks” from whom she is seeking employment. Denver left, but not before she had seen, sitting on a shelf by the back door, a blackboy’s mouth full of money. His head was thrown back farther than a head could go, his hands were shoved in his pockets. Bulging like moons, two eyes were all the face he had above the gaping red mouth. His hair was a cluster of raised, widely spaced dots made of nail heads. And he was on his knees. His mouth, wide as a cup, held the coins needed to pay for a delivery or some other small service, but he could just as well have held buttons, pins or crab-apple jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words “At Yo Service.” (1987/2004: 300)

You’d have to be a pretty callous reader not to be angered, saddened, and repulsed by this figure, which Morrison depicts as being put on shameless display by some of the “good” (i.e., sympathetic, liberal) “whitefolks” of 1873 Ohio. But if you’re the kind of close and unforgetful reader that Morrison wants and warrants, you might let this image of a single “blackboy” on his knees, with his head thrown inhumanly back and his “mouth full of money,” remind you (particularly if you’re acquainted with the properly pornographical meaning of the term “money-shot”) of an earlier scene in the novel, involving Paul D’s memory of being one of forty-six black men on a white-controlled chain-gang in Georgia. Chain-up completed, they knelt down. The dew, more likely than not, was mist by then. Heavy sometimes and if the dogs were quiet and just breathing you could hear doves. Kneeling in the mist they waited for the whim of a guard, or two, or three. Or maybe all of them wanted it. Wanted it from one prisoner in particular or none—or all. “Breakfast? Want some breakfast, nigger?” “Yes, sir.” “Hungry, nigger?” “Yes, sir.” “Here you go.” Occasionally a kneeling man chose gunshot in his head as the price, maybe, of taking a bit of foreskin with him to Jesus. Paul D did not know that then. He was looking at his palsied hands, smelling the guard, listening to his soft grunts so like the doves’, as he stood before the man kneeling in the mist on his right. Convinced he was next, Paul

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D retched—vomiting up nothing at all. An observing guard smashed his shoulder with the rifle and the engaged one decided to skip the new man for the time being lest his pants and shoes got soiled by nigger puke. (1987/2004: 127)

Now, except for the fact that the not-so-pretty “things” presented in these three great moments in literary history—the sweet sugar, the grand piano, the grotesque figurine—are better described as artifacts or commodities than as “documents” or written texts, we might say that these three great authors— Voltaire, Conrad, Morrison—all do a pretty good job of palpably rendering Walter Benjamin’s observation that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1950/1968: 256). But because the three “things” represented here are, strictly speaking, less documents than commodities, objects produced by dint of physical rather than merely imaginative labor, we can productively trace Benjamin’s axiom back to its source in Marx, specifically in the theory of alienated labor that Marx sets forth in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. There, and as we began to see in our first lesson, Marx argues that it is human labor and only human labor—“the act of production . . . the producing activity” (1932a/1978: 73; Adventures: 20)—that creates human reality, that objectively produces “humanity” itself. Marx, being a man of his times, often refers to human reality as “man”—as in “man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, the state, society” (Marx 1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 15), etc. And given his “historical materialist” assumption of the human creation of “man,” given his “socialist” assumption of the anthropogenetic nature of all human reality, Marx considers labor, the act of production, to be both the actual “origin of the species” and, at least potentially,“the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being” (1932a/1978: 88–9). However, as long as “man” is sufficiently self-benighted and selfimpoverished by the world religions “he” has in fact has created—for “man makes religion; religion does not make man” (Marx 1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 15)—this “objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being” isn’t really going to get “him” very far or make “the human world” that “man” is particularly rich. For “religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has lost himself again” (Marx 1844/1978: 53; Adventures: 15). But upon “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity”—as Immanuel Kant puts it in the essay “What is Enlightenment?”—upon, that is, man’s learning to “have the courage to use [his] own understanding” (Kant 1784/1996: 51) and to own his own self-conscious self-awareness, to no longer squander his treasures on deities, “Man, who has found in the fantastic reality of heaven, where he

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sought a supernatural being, only his own reflection, will no longer be tempted to find only the semblance of himself—a non-human being—where he seeks and must seek his true reality” (Marx 1844/1978: 53; Adventures 15). For Marx, “man,” in seeking “his true reality,” is easily capable of overcoming “his” self-alienation in the “fantastic” sphere of religion or the “idealist” realm of Hegelian philosophy, mainly because these dialectical overcomings can take place in the imaginary, through acts of interpretation. But while “the philosophers have only interpreted the world,” says Marx, “the point must be to change it” (1845/1978: 145), and changing the world by fully overcoming man’s self-alienation in the actually economic realm is another, much more “down to earth” matter. If under the systems of religion and idealist philosophy the “objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being” is “intellectually” misinterpreted by as yet unenlightened “man” himself, under the private property system of commodity production—a.k.a. capitalism—this “objectively unfolded richness” is quite materially transmogrified: it becomes an anythingbut-imaginary means of enriching, cultivating, and humanizing some men and women at the vital expense of others—at the expense not only of the others’ physical labor but, because for Marx labor is the essentially humanizing activity of all human beings everywhere in history, of their actual humanity.3 Thus we arrive at what Marx considers the ultimate or global contradiction, the “richest” irony of all time: instead of the objectively human production of a fully human world, a fully human society (i.e., democratic socialism), what we observe unfolding under capitalism—if we actually do “look into it”—is the human production of an inhuman world, the social production of an utterly reified reality in which “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men,” a reified reality where the world “which labor produces—labor’s product— confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer” (1932a/1978: 71). In Marx’s analysis, the world of private property, the world

3

In Marx’s analysis, workers—i.e., those who have no capital, no means of living other than selling their labor power to the capitalists—are alienated in four interrelated ways: they are alienated 1) from the product of their labor (think of workers in sweat-shops and mines who could not possibly afford to buy the pretty things—like your sneakers and smartphones—that they make; 2) from the activity of production (think of the miserable, repetitive, dehumanizing, soul-killing toil of such labor, which doesn’t seem to resemble the “objective unfolded richness” of anybody’s “essential being”); 3) from other human beings (from the owners and managers, who are always trying to extort more labor out of the worker for less money, and from other workers in a competitive and non-unionized “labor market”); and 4) from their own humanity or “species being,” as Marx puts it (since labor is the essentially humanizing activity, alienated labor is essentially dehumanizing). And these are just four of the reasons “why capitalism is an inherently alienating form of social life” (Hägglund 2020: 385).

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objectively produced by alienated labor (the world created by the workers but owned by the capitalists), is a world (and here’s where we start to get back to Benjamin) in which the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker; the mightier labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker; the more ingenious labor becomes, the duller becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s bondsman . . . It is true that labor produces for the rich wonderful things—but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces—but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty—but for the worker, deformity . . . It produces intelligence, but for the worker idiocy, cretinism. (1932a/1978: 73; Adventures: 17)

Now, as an historical materialist, Marx is of course writing here about the entire panoply of production, about all sorts of reified social processes, not just about well-formed and “wonderful things” of “beauty” and “intelligence.” Benjamin, however, while also writing as an historical materialist, is describing what he specifically calls “cultural treasures,” celebrated “things” of beauty and intelligence traditionally thought to possess “intrinsic” literary or aesthetic value—artworks or textual “documents” or literary masterpieces like, say, Candide, or Heart of Darkness, or Beloved. The historical materialist, says Benjamin, views all such beautifully formed literary achievements “with cautious detachment.” For without exception the cultural treasures [she] surveys have an origin which [she] cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. (1950/1968: 256)

II: What’s the matter with formalism? In The Significance of Theory, Terry Eagleton divides “literary critics” into two groups: “those who understand what Walter Benjamin meant” in the passage just quoted “and those who do not.” But Eagleton also suggests that

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you do not need ‘theory’ to understand the meaning of [Benjamin’s] claim; many of those subjected to barbarism, bereft of academic education, understand its meaning perfectly well. You may, however, require theory to work out some of its implications. Benjamin did not presumably mean by his statement that documents of civilization were nothing but records of barbarism. He meant that there is a way of reading—difficult and delicate—[by] which [one] can . . . X-ray the text in order to allow to emerge through its affirmative pronouncements the shadowy lineaments of the toil, misery and wretchedness which made it possible in the first place. (1990: 32–3)

For Eagleton, and indeed for most contemporary theoretical writers, the cadre of literary critics who basically don’t get Benjamin, who made not getting Benjamin their critical mission in life, who don’t have and who don’t seem to want anyone else to have Benjamin’s “X-ray” vision into literature, who don’t seem to want (anyone) “to look into it too much,” tend to be called (or even to call themselves) formalists (though not all forms of formalism are equally Benjamin-resistant). In the remainder of this lesson, we’ll consider two versions of literary formalism that actually had very little to do with each other.4 On the one hand, we’ll examine Anglo-American Formalism, a.k.a. New Criticism, the “mono-disciplinary” version that dominated literary studies in English from just after the Second World War through the Cold War and Vietnam Eras but which was eclipsed by theory in the late 1970s and onward. On the other hand, we’ll consider the earlier Russian Formalism—“a lively and important interdisciplinary school that flourished around 1920” (Harmon and Holman 2006: 226, my emphasis)—as a version of formalism that in many ways informs and participates in the later theoretical onslaughts and, unlike New Criticism, remains relatively compatible with the analytical aims of materialist semiotics, with theoretical writing as writing against reification. For the Russian formalists, formal study meant “the investigation of the specific properties of literary material, of the properties that distinguish such material from material of any other kind” (Eichenbaum 1978/1998: 8). Russian Formalism assumes that “the object of study in literary science is not literature but ‘literariness,’ that is, what makes a given work a literary work” (Jakobson, in Eichenbaum: 8). The Anglo-American Formalists were also

4

Interestingly, the entry on formalism in the BHLCT was written by Tom Eyers, author of Lacan and the Concept of the Real. Eyers’ entry also includes some discussion of structuralism, though we won’t be considering that school of thought until the next lesson, which begins by distinguishing formalism from structuralism.

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concerned with isolating the specifically “literary” qualities of literature, segregating poetic from ordinary language, separating literary art from other genres, and inoculating literary criticism against infection by other academic disciplines (like history or, worst of all, sociology). For the New Critics, however, formalism meant not only attention to the literariness of literature but an evaluative description of the literary work as an “organic unity” whose various parts all contribute to the “total” experience of the whole. But unlike the Russians, Anglo-American Formalists distanced themselves from “literary science” and devoted their energies to distinguishing literary study from scientific observation. Indeed, “the New Critics informed the study of literature with a concern for traditional religious and aesthetic values of the kind being displaced by science . . . the values of Christian theology and idealist aesthetics” (Rivkin and Ryan 1998: 7). We’ll address these “displaced” values later on. First, let’s examine some formal definitions of formalism—and some formal complaints filed against it. The entry for “Formalism” in Harmon and Holman’s Handbook to Literature, for example, begins simply enough with “A term applied to criticism that emphasizes the form of the artwork.” But the entry’s author doesn’t get much further before complaining that “The whole form-formalformalism family is beset by problems of reference.” The author observes that it is fairly easy to discuss form “with a clearly tangible object of culture, such as a cup,” but that with literary artworks “it is difficult to specify what the form is because plot may be the form that contains the characters, the characters the form that contains the thoughts and feelings, the thoughts and feelings the form that shapes the diction, the diction the form that shapes the acoustic effects, and so on” (2006: 223–4). Now, it’s fitting that in pointing out formalism’s problems of reference, the entry’s author distinguishes a cultural object like a cup from a literary artwork, for to judge from some of their book titles—The Verbal Icon, The Well-Wrought Urn—the American New Critics did seem to want to frame the literary work as a spatial object. And it’s this spatializing and decontextualizing tendency that prompts later, more socially and historically conscientious theorists to howl. Eagleton, for example, complains that in trying “to convert the poem into a self-sufficient object, as solid and material as an urn or icon . . . what New Criticism did, in fact, was to convert the poem in to a fetish” (1983/1996: 42). For the Marxist Eagleton, to defetishize a cultural object is to de-reify it, to convert the product to a process, to reveal the underlying social relations that produced the object before it attained the lofty dignity of the fetish. New Criticism is accused of fetishizing poems because its proponents desired to sever sonnets from any social context, and Eagleton here reads “form” as the very emblem of this ahistoricizing severance. For Eagleton,

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formalism and fetishism are twin symptoms of reification, and he thus calls formalism “a recipe for political inertia, and . . . submission to the political status quo” (1983/1996: 43). So let’s look at the key ingredients of this recipe for inertia more closely and consider in greater detail formalism’s alleged complicity with political submission, with ideological containment. In ordinary usage, the word “contain” would seem politically neutral, as for instance when I observe that the red Italian cup that rests beside the laptop on which I write contains coffee. Of course, a Marxist would counter that there’s nothing politically innocent about coffee or anything else a writer consumes, since questions of the forces and relations of production, private ownership of land, alienation and exploitation of labor, etc., all bear down upon the immiserating reality underlying the social fact of my fix of caffeine. In other words, Benjamin’s observation applies even to the not particularly well-wrought cultural object that contains my last remaining addiction. But Benjamin’s claim notwithstanding, let’s say that “this cup contains coffee” seems politically “neutral” in a way that a statement like, say, “the crowd has been contained” does not. For what was this crowd’s desire such that it needed to be contained, and by what “formal” methods? What relations obtain between the formal, seemingly neutral “containment” of coffee in a cup, or characters in a plot, and the more obviously political “containment” of unruly crowds (like, say, the striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, or those who at the original time of this writing were Occupying Wall Street and other avenues of capitalist hegemony, or, closer to the present time, all those protesting against the murder of George Floyd and agitating under the aegis of Black Lives Matter)? What links formal exercises in aesthetic control to regimented demonstrations of political force, compelling the aforementioned submission to the status quo? The New Critics did seem to have some “control issues,” as well as a strong investment in preserving the—or resurrecting a—status quo. I.A. Richards, for example, writes that “The arts are our storehouse of recorded values. They spring from and perpetuate hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their control and command of experience is at its highest” (in Bertens 2001:16). And Cleanth Brooks avers that “the characteristic unity of a poem . . . lies in the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total governing attitude” (1947/1998: 1361). Now, the terms I’ve emphasized here—control, command, unification, hierarchy, subordination, total governance—all sound sufficiently benign when bathed in an “autonomously” aesthetic or poetical light. But the same terms sound more sinister if they are denied their autonomy and reinserted into a historical and political context. For example, this characteristic bit of Brooksian analysis—“The last figure thus seems to

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me to summarize [Wordsworth’s] poem—to offer to almost every facet of meaning suggested in the earlier lines a concurring and resolving image which meets and accepts and reduces each item to its place in the total unity” (1951/2007: 804)—sounds perfectly lovely and critically compelling until we’re apprised of its author’s concurring involvement with the reactionary Vanderbilt Agrarians, or until we associate his rhetoric of resolution with their authoritarian solutions to social problems, their nostalgic desire to return to a traditional hierarchical Southern status quo in which every subordinate knew and obediently accepted his or her “rightful place” (no doubt “At Yo Service”) in the total governing unity.5 Now Vanderbilt University, where the Agrarians took their stand, is located in Nashville, Tennessee, not that far from Memphis, the historical setting of the photograph documenting military “crowd control” that we examined in the previous lesson on Hegel. As we saw there, we can productively view the content of this striking image of striking Black workers confronting an armed white militia in politically Hegelian terms. But we could also consider the shot from a purely aesthetic angle, as a formal composition—an autonomous, self-contained, and delicately balanced arrangement of lines, space, light, and shadow—and we could describe and evaluate everything we see that makes the photograph successful as a photograph without giving two hoots about the “racially charged” historical context. If we judge the photograph as a literary formalist would want us to judge a poem, we would have to demonstrate our “disinterestedness” in such “extrinsic” matters and exclude them from our consideration.6

5

6

For my money, Eagleton is historically accurate when he associates New Criticism with “irrationalism . . . religious dogma . . . and with the right-wing ‘blood and soil’ politics of the Agrarian movement” (1983/1996: 42). The Agrarians were “a group of Southern American writers in Nashville, Tennessee, who published The Fugitive (1922-1925), a little magazine . . . championing agrarian regionalism . . . Most of its contributors were associated with Vanderbilt University; among them were John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate . . . [and] Robert Penn Warren . . . In the 1930s, championing an agrarian economy as opposed to that of industrial capitalism, they issued a collective manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand . . . The Agrarians were among the founders of the New Criticism” (Harmon and Holman 2006: 11). Some of the Agrarians were also unabashedly racist (one might even say they were the lit-crit wing of the KKK): Allen Tate, author of the poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” is known to have haughtily declined to attend a Vanderbilt social event honoring visiting poet Langston Hughes on the stated grounds that Hughes was, well, after all, “a Negro” (Baker et al. 1988: 144). Some Agrarians, including Tate, were also open admirers of European fascism: see Brinkmeyer (2009). And, as we know from a glance at Staples (2017) and Whitman (2017), the European fascists were also admirers and imitators of the American Southerners. The term disinterestedness can be said to originate from Kant’s Critique of Judgment but “is perhaps most familiarly associated with the criticism of Matthew Arnold,” who used the word “to mean a state of ideal objectivity and neutrality, an impartiality that allows

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For formalism depends upon inclusion and exclusion, upon segregating “intrinsic” from “extrinsic” considerations. As David Richter puts it, “All versions of formalism proposed an ‘intrinsic’ criticism that defined and addressed the specifically literary qualities in the text, and all . . . began in reaction to various forms of ‘extrinsic’ criticism that viewed the text as either the product of social and historical forces or a document making an ethical statement” (2007: 749, emphasis added). But rather like fetishism, formalism also depends upon historical amnesia. Just as fetishists must forget that they actually made the fetish figure in order to endow that figure with magical powers, so formalists must forget the fact that their own critical activities indeed “began in reaction.” This amnesia allows the essentially “reactionary” distinction between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” to be taken as a positive given and forbids any close scrutiny of the exclusionary manner in which the “intrinsic” as such is produced. In other words, the Anglo-American Formalists assume certain “intrinsically” literary qualities as being simply and independently there. The “intrinsically” and essentially literary is thus allowed to assume the “timeless” contours of a Platonic ideal. Against such idealist essentialism, contemporary theoretical writers argue that the intrinsic qua intrinsic can be thought only with reference to the extrinsic, that the intrinsic is constituted by exclusion and is thus inescapably dependent on that which it excludes (just as the Hegelian Master’s Mastery depends upon the forced recognition of the working Slave, just as the capitalist’s private property depends the proletariat’s alienated labor, just as the efforts of great minds and talents owe their existence to the anonymous and often immiserating labor of their contemporaries). There can, in other words, be no “intrinsic” as such without referential dependence upon some needed but excluded other. And so the ideal of “intrinsic value” falls prey to the deconstructive principle of constitutive otherness. We can see this principle at work in other dictionary entries on formalism that focus on what formalism self-definingly excludes. Childers and Hentzi define formalism as “the critical practice of focusing on the artistic technique of the text or object under consideration at the expense of the subject matter” and write that the term “has often been applied pejoratively to a number of types of criticism that emphasize a work’s structural design or pattern, or its style and manner—its form—in

the critic to see an object ‘as in itself it really is.’ ” Disinterestedness is “the cornerstone of an objectivist theory of poetry, which invokes timeless standards of quality.” Contemporary theory dismisses the possibility of disinterestedness or objectivity and “emphasizes the imbrications of individuals in language, history, and culture” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 85–6).

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isolation from its contents” (1995: 116, emphases added); meanwhile Julian Wolfreys informs us that “The formalist approach to literature is one which, allegedly, retreats from any consideration of history, ideology or context, concerning itself only with the formal aspects of the text” (2004: 142, emphasis added). Expense, isolation, reaction, retreat: such are the impoverishing terms of formalism’s self-enrichment and self-fortification. But the actual problem with formalism involves the way its “literary” exclusions mirror and abet other, more literal forms of exclusion and containment. In this sense, we could say that Virginia Woolf pretty much nails the main ethical and political problem with Anglo-American Formalism a few decades before its full development as a critical school. At the end of the first chapter of A Room of One’s Own, after describing being shut out of the library and shooed off the greens of the all-male enclave she archly calls “Oxbridge” University, Woolf, effectively demolishing New Criticism before the fact of its advent, writes that she “thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and . . . how it is worse perhaps to be locked in; and . . . of the safety and prosperity of the one sex and of the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack of tradition upon the mind of a writer” (1929/2005: 24). Woolf also preemptively tears formalism a new one when she writes that Shakespeare’s plays . . . seem to hang there complete by themselves [which is of course how the New Critics will want the bard’s plays to hang]. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in. (1929/2005: 41–2)

With Woolf ’s “preposterous” assistance, “one remembers” in advance the expense both of excluding others and of isolating the literary work from any concern with the actual social conditions that produced it, “the toil, misery and wretchedness which made it possible in the first place” (Eagleton 1990: 33). The New Critics essentially wanted to segregate literary works from their various contexts in order to talk about literature as literature. They invested in “the drawing of distinctions” and assumed not merely the utility but the inevitability of the distinctions they themselves drew. As Brooks puts it, “Man’s experience is indeed a seamless garment, no part of which can be separated from the rest. Yet if we urge this fact of inseparability against the drawing of distinctions, then there is no point in talking about criticism at all.

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I am assuming that distinctions are necessary and useful and indeed inevitable” (1952/2007: 798–9). As Wimsatt and Beardsley reiterate: There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context— or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about. (1954/2007: 815).

But most contemporary theoretical writers hold to the conviction that it is only by radically considering contexts, unveiling occluded political desires, that we have anything critically engaging to discuss. More to the point, most contemporary theorists suspect that the New Critical effort to jettison context arose not simply from the desire to talk brightly about literature “for literature’s sake” but, more darkly, from the desire to silence or exclude other questions, and that this desire was part and parcel of the need to muzzle other questioners—interlocutors and interlopers who didn’t physically or psychically resemble the straight, white, upper middle-class, right-wing Christian men who were the New Critics themselves. As Robert Dale Parker points out: The new critics’ effort to exile social meaning carries (ironically) a social meaning, for it suggests their fear of the changing social world, of conflicts across [the lines of] race, gender, and class. Their vision of unity has no place, literarily or socially, for most of the rest of us. (2008: 25)

The problem with formalism, then, is that it attempts to forget what historical materialists like Marx and Benjamin and Woolf and all those “writing against reification” can never afford not to remember: “the work of [the rest of us] suffering human beings.”7

7

Repeating Virginia Woolf ’s phrase with a twist, I’m conflating her specifically literary “work” with Eagleton’s generally materialist “toil” in order to underscore Benjamin’s point that these two forms of labor—the sublimely civilized work located in the cultural superstructure, the barbarically wretched toil located in the socio-economic base—are inextricably related (“Base and superstructure are Marxist terms referring to the interdependent and reflexive relationship between the economic foundations of society (base) and the forms of state and social consciousness which inevitably follow that structure” [Childers and Hentzi 1995: 27]). But I also employ Woolf ’s phrase, and change

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III: Strategies of estrangement Russian Formalism got along quite well without New Criticism’s idealist, theological, and segregationist baggage, which is one reason why Victor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization, or ostranenie, as developed in the 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” can be considered compatible with the work of contemporary theoretical writing. Shklovsky begins his essay by taking issue with Alexander Potebnya’s assertion that “art is thinking in images” (1917/2007: 775; Adventures: 49). Shklovsky doesn’t really mind Potebnya’s effort to specify an activity that would define the essential “artiness” of verbal art; he just doesn’t think that

an adjective to a verb, in order to suggest that “the work of suffering human beings” can be very hard work indeed, given how insufferable some of them prove themselves to be. And I confess that what I find most insufferable in Anglo-American Formalism is its obvious indenture to “religious dogma” (Eagleton 1983/1996: 42). Now, in the first edition of Ten Lessons, I devoted the next section of this lesson, which I called “Absolutions of Irony,” to a lengthy discussion of Cleanth Brooks as “a reactionary religious acolyte wearing literary critic’s clothing” who was “particularly invested in transubstantiating ‘new’ criticism into a quite traditional form of Christian devotion.” I’m omitting the whole discussion of Brooks and his “credo” in the second edition, though I’m salvaging the following lengthy contextualization of that discussion: In “The Rise of English,” Eagleton suggests that “If one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English studies in the later nineteenth century, one could do worse that reply ‘the failure of religion’ ” (1983/1996: 20). What he means here is that “English studies,” in picking up the ball that “organized religion” in late Victorian society supposedly dropped, assumed religion’s function of maintaining “ideological control” through acting as a sort of “social ‘cement’ ”—providing critical crowd containment, engaging and binding readers at the level of “deep-seated a-rational fears and needs”, “fostering” in the effectively pacified flock not revolution but “meekness, self-sacrifice and the contemplative inner life” (1983/1996: 20). In other words, says Eagleton, English studies were originally complicit with, not a liberatory break from, the ideological functions of “failed” religion. Like religion, English studies were basically invented to help ensure “political inertia and submission to the political status quo” (1983/1996: 43). And one upshot of this massopiating complicity of English studies with religion was that some English professors set themselves up as displaced priests whose classrooms became dens of religious genuflection. For Eagleton “the key figure here is Matthew Arnold” (1983/1996: 21), who in 1880 expressed the belief that “we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” and that “most of what now passes with us for religion . . . will be replaced by poetry (in Bertens 2001: 2). Consider also the language of the British Board of Education’s 1921 “Newbolt Report”: “Literature is not just a subject for academic study, but one of the chief temples of the Human spirit, in which all should worship” (in Bertens 2001: 10). And consider I.A. Richards, who like Arnold “saw in poetry an antidote to . . . spiritual malaise,” who believed that verse is a means of “overcoming chaos” and that literature “is capable of saving us” (in Bertens 2001: 16). Small wonder, then, that the New Critics, influenced by Arnold and Richards, saw themselves as “disappointed priests seeking in literature for a new Word to replace the one the world had lost” (Richter 2007: 760).

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“thinking in images” quite fits the bill. In particular, Shklovsky objects to Potebnya’s assertion that “the purpose of imagery is to help channel various objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means of the known” (1917/2007: 775; Adventures: 49)—or at least he objects to the idea that epistemological clarification amounts to a specifically aesthetic use or experience of language. Another objection involves the problem of literary history: if imagery is the defining characteristic of poetry, as Potebnya asserts, then a history of poetics would have to account for changes in imagery, whereas poetic images, in Shklovsky’s opinion, change very little. Poets, he writes, “are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them” (1917/2007: 776; Adventures: 51); verbal artistry, for Shklovsky, thus essentially concerns strategy or technique, not creation or clarification. Furthermore, since imagery is an aspect of both poetry and prose, one can hardly allow imagery to define poetry. Potebnya, says Shklovsky, “ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetry, as a means of reinforcing an impression.” He clarifies the distinction as follows: I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing with my glasses and drops them. I call, “Hey, butterfingers!” This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, “butterfingers” is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric.) (1917/2007: 776; Adventures: 51–2)

Now, this distinction between metaphor and metonymy will assume a certain importance in the later adventures of literary theory, so let’s linger with it for a while. Why, let’s ask, does Shklovsky label the first use of “butterfingers” metonymic and the second metaphoric? Why would he consider metaphor (a figure of speech based on similarity or analogy) poetic and call metonymy (a figure of speech based on association or contiguity) prosaic? We might say that the first instance of “butterfingers” is metonymic because prosaic or “realistic.” In the first example, that is, the child really does have butter on her fingers, and the physical contiguity of the real matter with the actual fingers is mirrored and affirmed by the physical combination of “butter” with “fingers” in the trope “butterfingers.” In the second example, the child does not really have butter on her fingers, but in the metaphor

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“butterfingers” it’s as if she did, as if the slippery substance had caused her to drop Shklovsky’s glasses. Thus the difference between metonym and metaphor can be read as the difference between, on the one hand, the prosaic and realistic and, on the other, the imaginative (the as if) and the negative (the not really). Both instances involve imagery, if you like, but while the first, metonymic usage is prosaic, “journalistic,” mere sensory reportage that allows us to “see” what’s actually there (butter on fingers), the second, metaphorical usage is poetic, more verbally and cognitively “artistic,” an imaginative leap that invites us to envision what’s not really there (again, butter on fingers). But there’s an irony here, involving ostranenie, even if Shklovsky himself doesn’t put his finger on it. If I mumble “butterfingers!” at some fumbler whose fingers aren’t literally buttered, I have indeed employed metaphor rather than metonymy. But my metaphorical usage isn’t, simply by virtue of being metaphorical, necessarily more “poetic” than my metonymically calling a really butterfingered person “butterfingers.” Why not? Well, perhaps the metaphor was fresh in 1917, but today this facile figure is so well-worn and overly lubricated that it’s practically become what automatically slips out of the average person’s hole in response to seeing another lose her grip. On the other hand, it takes a special sort of idiot to be so obvious as to dub the really butterfingered person a “butterfingers.” Either our idiot is ignorant of the metaphor and is simply using the metonym to register exactly what he sees, or the idiot is more adroitly referring to and negating the clichéd metaphorical negation, as if to say “Your attention, please. Ordinarily, the average person uses the metaphor butterfingers to refer not to someone with literally buttered fingers but to a fumbler—but, look, here I’m with a sort of ostentatious mockstupidity doing just the opposite, inserting the obviously prosaic metonym in the place of the more familiarly ‘poetic’ metaphor.” In either case, this idiotically “real” use of the metonym “butterfingers” is rather extraordinary compared to the average/automatic utterance of the clichéd metaphor. Through over-use and over-familiarity, the metaphor has lost its edge, become practically literal, and so now the metonym—by virtue of a hyper-literal foregrounding of the obvious that disturbs or displaces the familiar—actually creates the stronger impression. And since for Shklovsky “poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression” (1917/2007: 776; Adventures: 52), here the realistic metonym could be considered more poetic, more a “work of art,” than the standard metaphor. Shklovsky writes that “by ‘works of art’ . . . we mean works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible” and thus to create “the strongest possible impression.” He writes that “poetic imagery” is one such impressive technique, but that “as a method it is,

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depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than other poetic techniques” (1917/2007: 776; Adventures: 51). His adversary Potebnya’s “law of the economy of creative effort” (1917/2007: 777; Adventures: 52) pertains to modes of perception that involve the least possible mental exertion and to modes of discourse that communicate the most expediently. Again, Shklovsky doesn’t mind the application of this law to practical language, but he objects to its being extended to poetry. He writes that “If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic” and that “all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic” (1917/2007: 778; Adventures: 54). Such unconscious automatism leads us into a sort of perceptual “algebra” by means of which we do not see objects “in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics.” We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten . . . The process of “algebrization,” the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. (1917/2007: 778; Adventures: 54, emphases added)

The purpose of art, however, is for Shklovsky precisely to disrupt this “habitualization” and “algebrization” of perceived objects. The purpose of art is to de-automatize, to dis-habituate, to discomfort, to defamiliarize. Shklovsky cites a passage from Tolstoy’s diary registering the extent to which our habituation of so much of our daily lives has the effect of erasing our lives’ real substance. He writes that in accord with this dismal algebra “life is reckoned as nothing” because “habitualization devours” just about everything. As Tolstoy complains, “If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.” For Shklovsky, however, “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (1917/2007: 778; Adventures: 55, emphasis added)

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These passages establish Shklovsky’s “formalist” bona fides—because only a formalist would ever privilege technique over content. For Shklovsky, however, a “form” is not an “organic unity,” a “self-sufficient object,” a “spatial figure,” a reified “fetish” or article of faith, but rather a “temporal process” (Eagleton 1983/1996: 42): “A work is created ‘artistically’ so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of perception. As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its [temporal] continuity” (1917/2007: 783; Adventures: 63). Form, then, is not a perceived thing but a “difficult” perceptual event. Thus, for Shklovsky, form is not a means of “containment” but rather engages our perceptual resistance to containment, particularly epistemological containment. Art for Shklovsky is a struggle against our habitual attempt to “clarify the unknown by means of the known.” What “difficult” forms resist is our normal, ordinary, routine, automatic ways of understanding, of taking the world in. And given the extent to which we’ve been “taken in” by “normal understanding”—trained to revere “understanding” or “knowledge” (or “faith” in “truth”) above everything else—perhaps the most “difficult” aspect of Shklovsky’s “formalism” is the provocative way he pits art against “understanding,” the way he distinguishes between the “event” of seeing and the “uneventful” act of knowing, between enlivening aesthetic perception and mortifyingly familiar knowledge. Nietzsche, as you’ll recall, diagnosed the epistemological drive in terms of the anxious desire to reduce “the strange” to “the familiar.” For Nietzsche the familiar is “what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, . . . anything at all in which we feel at home,” and so “our need for knowledge [is] precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us.” For Nietzsche it is “the instinct of fear that bids us to know” and “the jubilation of those who attain knowledge . . . [is] jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security” (1887/2006: 368). Following Nietzsche, Shklovsky cautions us against the habituating aspects of “secure” knowledge and offers art’s strategies of estrangement as a means of recovering sensations and perceptions that we lose or miss through ease, habit, faith, or fear. For Shklovsky, artistic defamiliarization and epistemological clarification are in tension each other, and the former—or perhaps the formal—is actively hostile to the latter. I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found. In other words, . . . an image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special

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perception of the object—it creates a “vision” of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it. (1917/2007: 781; Adventures: 60)

In studying art, then, and particularly “poetic speech,” what we find, writes Shklovsky, is “the artistic trademark . . . We find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author’s purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception” (1917/2007: 783; Adventures: 63). Positing “form” as defamiliarization allows Shklovsky to privilege the temporal aspects of poetry as “formed speech” (1917/2007:784; Adventures: 65) over the spatial aspects, which in turn allows us to distinguish Shklovsky’s formalism from New Critical fetishism. But defamiliarization also opens up a way of reading the history of poetic perception, and this opening also sets Shklovsky’s formalism apart from New Criticism’s closed and ahistoricizing “idealist aesthetics.” Shklovsky calls poetry “a difficult, roughened, impeded language” (1917/2007: 783; Adventures: 64) and defines poetry as “attenuated, tortuous speech” (1917/2007: 784; Adventures: 65). Given this definition, we might posit that one aspect of poetry’s rough trade would involve “promoting the palpability of signs,” deepening “the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects,” as Roman Jakobson will later put it (1960/2007: 856). But another aspect of “torturous” defamiliarization involves what Shklovsky calls “disordering the rhythm” of poetic speech. “The rhythm of prose is an important automatizing element; the rhythm of poetry is not” (1917/2007: 784; Adventures: 65). And yet Shklovsky quickly points out that rhythmic disordering “cannot be predicted” or systematized: “Should the disordering of rhythm become a convention, it would be ineffective as a device for the roughening of language” (1917/2007: 784; Adventures: 66). And here’s where history, of a sort, enters the picture. Shklovsky insists that artworks are “works created by special techniques designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible.” But specific techniques or devices don’t always or eternally work to make artworks artworks. In the fourteenth century, for Giotto, the specifically new technique that made the painting obviously artistic was perspective; in the nineteenth century, for Gauguin, the device that made the painting obviously artistic was the abolition of perspective.8 Or, to go back to “butterfingers”: in a specific historical context,

8

In painting, perspective is the “method of representing spatial extension into depth on a flat or shallow surface, utilizing such optical phenomena as the apparent diminution in size of objects and the convergence of parallel lines as they recede from the spectator” (Chilvers and Osborne 1988: 379). Perspective is a technique that gives the illusion of three-dimensional depth to a two-dimensional canvas.

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a roughly “prosaic” metonym might be more “artistic” than a smoothly “poetical” metaphor. Some coarse prose might be more palpably “attenuated” than some fluent poetry. One can never predict or permanently decide in advance exactly what it will take for an artist in any genre to make us feel or see, to make the stone stony, to make the painting painterly, to form (or torture) practical language into poetry. And here’s where history of another sort enters the picture. Shklovsky writes that “According to Aristotle, poetic language must appear strange and wonderful; and in fact, it is often actually foreign” (1917/2007: 784; Adventures: 63). He goes on to cite examples of linguistic, historical, and geographical “foreignnesses” embedded within various poetical practices. For Shklovsky, then, poetic language, by appearing strange and wonderful, allows “foreignness” itself to appear strange and wonderful—rather than, say, bewildering and terrifying. Impeding the reactionary and paranoid habit of “clarifying the unknown by means of the known,” poetry—the language of defamiliarization—can serve an ethical political purpose in promoting openness to “the foreign,” teaching its readers not to be afraid of “the other” (not, for example, to automatically assume the “foreigner” to be a “terrorist”). Not that any form of “attenuated, tortuous speech” possesses some inherently ethical power to keep reactionaries from torturing foreigners or to prevent literal exterminations of the unfamiliar. There is no necessary or “intrinsic” relation between aesthetic defamiliarization and a progressive or liberatory ethics of alterity. There is no “specific technique” that can both make our artwork “as obviously artistic as possible” and permanently keep the documents of our civilization from becoming the registers of our barbarity. And yet, for some writers, the hope remains that art in some rough form or another can still make at least a few stones stony. Or, in other words, the hope remains that an interventional art of the sentence can remain “a crucial element of critical subversion, a political mode [of writing] that is designed to produce a sense of alienation and discomfort in the reader so that newness may enter and alter a defamiliarized world” (Salih 2004: 4).

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Seven: alienated labor, formalists/formalism, Agrarians, disinterestedness, base/ superstructure, perspective

Lesson Eight

“The unconscious is structured like a language” —or, invasions of the signifier

I: Without positive terms Not everyone buys into “the conviction that of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan’s is the richest” (Jameson 2006: 365–6). But for those who are heavily invested in Lacan, the great wealth of his psychoanalytic writing flows from its active trading with semiotics and structural linguistics. Lacan, that is, first “struck it rich” by reading Freud as if Freud had read Saussure, by rethinking Freud’s discoveries through Saussure’s “linguistic turn,” and by cashing in on the claim that “the unconscious is structured like a language” (1973/1981: 203).1 Our task in this lesson will be to understand what allows Lacan to stake his signature claim. We’ve of course already encountered the unconscious, the real kernel of Freudian discovery; we’ve also heard quite a bit about language,

1

Lacan writes that while “Freud could not have taken into account modern linguistics, which postdates him,” Freud’s discovery “stands out precisely because, in setting out from a domain in which one could not have expected to encounter linguistics’ reign, it had to anticipate its formulations” (1966f/2006: 578). Lacan asserts that when Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900, “it was way ahead of the formalizations of linguistics for which . . . it paved the way” (1966e/2006: 426); moreover, Lacan notes that “in Freud’s complete works, one out of three pages presents us with philological references . . . linguistic analysis becoming still more prevalent the more directly the unconscious is involved” (1966e/2006: 424). In How to Read Lacan, Žižek writes that “Lacan started his ‘return to Freud’ with the linguistic reading of the entire psychoanalytic edifice, encapsulated by what is perhaps his single best-known formula: ‘The unconscious is structured as a language.’ The predominant perception of the unconscious is that it is the domain of irrational drives, something opposed to the rational conscious self. For Lacan, this notion of the unconscious belongs to the Romantic Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and has nothing to do with Freud. The Freudian unconscious caused such a scandal not because of the claim that the rational self is subordinated to the much vaster domain of blind irrational instincts, but because it demonstrated how the unconscious itself obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks” (2007: 2–3).

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the central concern of semiotics and structuralism, the study of signs and of sign systems. But what exactly is “a sign” for a semiotician? How, in a structuralist understanding, do sign systems work? How does the “structure” in structuralism differ from the “form” in formalism? In the previous lesson, we witnessed that “form” for a formalist tends to resolve into an ostensibly “singular” thing (“organic unity” for Brooks and company) or technique (“defamiliarization” for Shklovsky). According to Robert Dale Parker, however, “we cannot say that structuralism is any one thing” (Parker 2008: 40). And the reason we can’t say any such thing about structuralism is that structuralism pretty much demolishes the idea of there ever being any one thing, any absolutely singular element that can meaningfully “stand alone,” independent of all other units of meaning. So when we read that “if we boil structuralism down to one idea, it is about understanding concepts through their relation to other concepts, rather than understanding them as intrinsic, in isolation from each other” (Parker 2008: 40), we can grasp what distinguishes a structuralist understanding of “textuality in general” from formalism’s intrinsically “literary” and socially isolated text. If we do “boil structuralism down to one idea,” it’s that there can never be any such thing as one idea, one single “positive term”: it’s about “coming to terms” with the realization that “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1959: 120; Adventures: 45); it’s about understanding that “language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (Saussure 1959: 114). Now structuralism’s big idea isn’t that there’s “no such thing” as big ideas, or that meanings “simply don’t exist”; rather, the thrust of structuralism is that ideational meanings don’t exist simply: ideas exist, but they exist only in language, and “language being what it is, we shall find nothing simple in it” (Saussure 1959: 122; Adventures: 47). The structuralist idea is that ideas cannot exist except in differential relation to each other. Of course, the underlying ideal of Western metaphysics since Plato has involved the belief that meaningful ideas really do abide in their independently self-present “truth,” prior to any language that might be used to express, represent, or “stand for” them. But structuralism won’t stand for any of that. Structuralism posits that “there are no pre-existing ideas” (Saussure 1959: 112), that “no ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct”—much less true— “before the introduction of linguistic structure” (Saussure 1972/1986: 110): “Language,” writes Saussure, “has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system” (1959:120).

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Language for Saussure is thus necessarily, interdependently, systematic— “a form and not a substance” (1959: 122; Adventures: 47). There can’t be an “unstructured” language, any more than there could be an “unstructured” society or an “unstructured” psychic apparatus. And so the structuralist argument that “thought is linguistic” and that “concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression” (Jameson 2004: 403) entails the radical premise that linguistic structure constitutes the fundamental condition of possibility for all recognizably human reality, social, corporeal, and psychic. “The structuralist idea is that reality is linguistic and structured, not that there is no reality but that we construct it, so that there is no reality independent of language.” The structuralist idea is that “language not only describes our world [but] also produces the world it describes” (Parker 2008: 46). This conception of language as world-forming is what sets theoretical writing after structuralism apart from preceding or competing literary criticisms. Regarding structuralism’s specific difference from formalism, then, we can say that if “for the new critics, the goal is to interpret the individual text,” the structuralist goal is “to describe or interpret the larger system” (Parker 2008: 47–8). And because the structuralist concern is with “the larger system,” formalism’s more limited focus on the specific “literariness of literature” seems pretty small potatoes. And yet, while structuralism would appear to neglect literature’s sublime (or starchy) literariness, structuralism’s emphasis on the larger system’s “linguistic foundation” arguably extends the strange condition of literature into every corner of human reality; “literature” thus gains considerably “larger” significance by losing the isolated and elevated status that formalism had bestowed upon it. In the chapter of his Structuralist Poetics called “The Linguistic Foundation,” Jonathan Culler refers to the structuralist “notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena” (1975: 4). By “other cultural phenomena,” Culler means 1) cultural forms that don’t traditionally count as “creative writing” (that aren’t poems, novels, plays, etc.) and 2) cultural phenomena (like fashion shows or football games) that hadn’t previously appeared to involve “language” to any pertinent extent and so hadn’t usually been considered suitable for linguistic analysis, much less “worthy” of close reading. For structuralism, however, all cultural phenomena are wide open to linguistic analysis; moreover, all phenomena, even ostensibly “natural” phenomena, are “actually” always cultural objects that warrant being attentively read. In the key structuralist text Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes that structuralists “take language, discourse, speech, etc., to mean any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual: . . . even objects will

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become speech, if they mean something” (1957/1985: 110–11; Adventures: 78). “Every object in the world,” says Barthes, “can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, natural or not, which forbids talking about things” (1957/1985: 109; Adventures: 77–8). Culler thus writes that the notion that linguistics might be useful in studying other cultural phenomena is based on two fundamental insights: first, that social and cultural phenomena are not simply material objects or events but objects or events with meaning, and hence signs; and second, that they [signs] do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations. (1975: 4)

The first insight is basic to semiology, or semiotics, the “science of signs,” while the second is the foundation of structuralism, the analysis of the underlying systemic networks that make meaning, culture, human reality possible. For Culler, however, these twin insights are “inseparable,” for “in studying signs one must investigate the system of relations that enables meaning to be produced and, reciprocally, one can only determine what are the pertinent relations among items by considering them as signs” (1975: 4). The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules: rules which do not regulate behaviour so much as create the possibility of particular forms of behaviour. The rules of English enable sequences of sound to have meaning; they make it possible to utter grammatical or ungrammatical sentences. And analogously, various social rules make it possible to marry, to score a goal, to write a poem, to be impolite. It is in this sense that a culture is composed of a set of symbolic systems. (1975: 5)

OK, so in human reality, everything and everyone is made of rules, composed of signs. But signs, we are told, “do not have essences”; they—and hence presumably we—“are defined by a network of relations.” What allows structuralism this disturbingly “anti-essentialist” claim? What makes the claim disturbing in the first place, and for whom? Of course, the claim that signs lack essences won’t fundamentally disturb anyone who doesn’t think much of signs anyway; it wouldn’t bother anyone who assumes that the “real truth” of ideas, experiences, or identities pre-exists any signs that might subsequently be used, like mere tools, to express or describe them. Such a “believer” wouldn’t feel spiritually infected by the essencelessness of signs; he would be no more disturbed by the claim that signs lack essences than he would be surprised to hear that his screwdriver or word-processor didn’t

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have a soul; he could readily admit that signs don’t have essences while still securely holding on to his own, so to speak. But the claim against significant essences could be unsettling for anyone who takes to heart the structuralist premise that signs systematically “create the possibility” for the very reality, the very ideas and very identities, that they are normally thought merely to describe. So given the “existential” stakes involved here, what, again, allows the structuralist to deprive us and our signs of any “essential” natures? What are these hungry ghosts called signs, anyway—particularly for the semiotician whose job is to study them? The nineteenth-century American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished among iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs. In Peirce’s schema, iconic signs are mimetic, basically pictographic representations: a crude drawing on a chalkboard could be “iconically” taken to signify, for example, a cat. Indexical signs, on the other hand, are effective indices or “indicators” of pre-existing natural or physical causes: smoke indicates fire, stench indicates rot, etc. Note that an attempted iconic sign, like the drawing of the cat on the chalkboard, might be so miserably rendered that no one can possibly make out “what it’s supposed to be”; the failed iconic sign, however, can still function as an index of the merely physical fact that someone has been marking, however ineptly, on the board. But while iconic and indexical signs can be “grasped” or “sensed” by those who can’t read (a preschooler can recognize a well-drawn kitty, a real cat knows what to make of an emanating odor), a symbolic sign, like the word “cat,” can successfully signify only to a reader who knows the language in which it is written, in this case English. If a word for “cat” is chalked on the board in some language I can’t read, then the marks can signify indexically for me (I can take them as indicating that someone has been marking on the board), but not symbolically (I can’t really tell what the marks symbolize, what they’re supposed to mean). For Saussure, all linguistic signs, all words, are symbolic in Peirce’s sense, which means that their primary signifying function is neither iconic nor indexical, that words signify by being neither naturally mimetic images nor simple indices of physical cause-effect relations. But Saussure inveighs against our using the term “symbol” to “designate the linguistic sign” (1959: 68), because while “the linguistic sign is arbitrary”—and we’ll be discussing at length the huge implications of that little zinger—“one characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales, could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot” (1959: 67, 68).

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For Saussure, “symbol” isn’t quite the right word for a word because symbols can still participate in iconic or indexical significations, both of which imply some “natural bond” or physical motivation. But words are completely “empty” of and by “nature.” The linguistic sign, Saussure insists, is not only “antiphysical,” in all the senses of that word that we’ve explored in previous lessons, but arbitrary, which means that words are based not on physical nature but on social convention, collective agreements. Saussure cautions that the term arbitrary “should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker,” for “the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community.” Rather, to say that the signifier is arbitrary means “that it is unmotivated, i.e., arbitrary in that it has no natural connection with the signified” (1959: 69). Now, Saussure writes that “the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign . . . dominates all the linguistics of language” and that “its consequences are numberless” (1959: 68). Indeed, the implications of the principle “that there is no fixed bond” (1959: 69) between signifiers and signifieds or signs and referents are far more numerous and extensive than Saussure himself might have wanted to envision. But because the principle of the sign’s “arbitrary nature” has proven to be so consequential, we need to make sure we understand exactly what Saussure means by it. In Saussurean terms, a linguistic sign couples a signifier with a signified in order to designate a referent. The signifier functions as an “acoustic image”; the signified is the “concept” that this acoustic image conventionally evokes; while the referent is the “real thing” in the world that the sign (signifier and signified combined) conventionally designates. In the case of the “cat” inscribed on the chalkboard, the signifier is the image, the perceptual imprint, of the grouped letters c/a/t, coupled with the phonetic sound—kat—that in English conventionally corresponds to those marks. Please note that on the side of the signifier the “image” is not your mental vision of some feline but merely your visual perception of this trio of marks, c/a/t, as they appear on the board or page. Note also the absence of any natural, fixed, or inevitable “bond” between the legible mark “c” and the hard “k” sound we are trained to make in English when we perceive that mark; obviously, other languages couple differently imaged marks with that particular sound. Note further that there is no “natural bond” between the signifier “cat” and the signified concept or mental image of a real cat. If there were some natural connection or physical cause-effect relation between them, then the marks “c/a/t” would inevitably provoke both the sound “kat” and the mental image of a cat for, say, a Ukrainian person who didn’t read English, just as fire inevitably causes smoke, or rot stench, everywhere in the natural world.

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So here’s the crux of the matter: the condition of language is such that the linguistic sign has no natural connection, no motivated, iconic, or indexical relation, to anything in the physical world—and hence neither do we. This is not to say that neither language nor we, the animals at its mercy, have any connection with “nature” whatsoever; it is only to say that for us, as specifically human beings, there is no simply natural relation, no physically motivated connection, between signifiers and signifieds or words and things. What we have instead of merely natural relations is a shifting ensemble of arbitrary, contingent, socially conventional relations—in other words, and once again, what we have is only what we ourselves make: the ongoing history of a world that must be made to mean. Now, as I hope you’ll recall from earlier lessons, Roland Barthes refers to myth as a “depoliticizing” type of speech that attempts to turn this “history” back into “nature,” into a static realm of naturalized significations in which “things appear to mean something by themselves” (1957/1985: 143; Adventures: 88). Myth in Barthes’ sense depends upon a sort of enforced ignorance about the arbitrary, conventional, unmotivated “nature” of the linguistic sign. Myth, in other words, is politically motivated to paper over language’s lack of natural motivation, to actively depoliticize speech by ignoring or obscuring its purely fabricated social conventionality. Myth attempts to maintain the fiction that language isn’t fictional, to support the illusion that linguistic signs really do function iconically or indexically; myth, that is, attempts to permanently bond signifiers to signifieds, to make the connection between them seem as natural and inevitable as the indexical connection of smoke to fire or stench to rot. In other words, myth presents words as if they were natural facts, not social forms, as if they were completely “positive” terms without any “inmixture of otherness.” But Saussure’s myth-shattering assertion is that “in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms” (1959: 120; Adventures: 45). We should understand that a “positive term”—if it existed—would involve a fixed or fundamentally grounded content; a “positive term” would simply and independently be what it is and mean what it means, all by itself, just naturally. But against this myth of terminological positivity, Saussure argues that any word’s “content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it” (1959: 115), that terms “are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not” (1959: 117). Of course, Saussure is here discussing terms, not real things. He’s not suggesting that the “most precise characteristic” of a real cat is that it isn’t a

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hotdog; rest assured that, for all a structuralist cares, a real cat can simply be what it is, positively. But for a structuralist the signifier “cat” cannot be a positive term; the signifier “cat” is what it legibly is, means what it visibly/ audibly means, only because of its difference from other signifiers, “outsiders” that are “almost the same but not quite”: rat, sat, mat, pat, lat, hat, etc. If linguistic structure is in fact “made” entirely of such micro-differences, if any signifier’s most precise characteristic is not its positive content but its situation in relation to some other term that it’s not, then Saussure is justified in claiming that “in language there are only differences without positive terms,” that “everything in language is negative” (1959: 120; Adventures: 45). All these Saussurean claims are of course the “linguistic foundation” for Culler’s unsettling assertion that signs “do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations” (1975: 4). These claims are also the condition of possibility for the anti-essentialist or deconstructive principle of “constitutive otherness” that I mentioned in the previous lesson—i.e., the idea that any meaningful entity “is what it is” only by virtue of its difference from, and dependence upon, other entities. But Saussure may well have sensed the threat his principles posed to traditional metaphysics, to “the underlying ideal of Western culture,” for, perhaps protecting his own unconscious investment in that very ideal, Saussure backs away from his own “new rule” pretty quickly after having laid it down. Having just said that everything he’s said “boils down” to the bold statement that “in language there are only differences without positive terms,” Saussure seems to back-paddle: “But the statement that everything in language is negative is true only if the signified and signifier are considered separately; when we consider the sign in its totality, we have something that is positive in its own class” (1959: 120; Adventures: 45). And as Saussure continues to recant, insisting that the sign in its totality somehow can be terminally positive, certain clichés—involving barn doors being shut after horses have bolted, cats being let out of bags, and oddly named eggs falling off their walls—may well pop into the close reader’s mind. For once we very close readers have taken to heart Saussure’s central claims about language, nothing that he says thereafter can put our shattered faith in “positive terms” back together again; nothing can restore our previously held idealist belief that signs really do have essences; nothing can persuade us that the structuralist slogan “everything in language is negative” isn’t completely valid for “the sign considered in its totality”—and hence for human reality considered in its totality as well. Indeed, after Saussure’s totally linguistic turn of the screw, nothing—not even the “nothing” that Hamlet calls “a fair thing to lie between a maid’s legs”—has ever been exactly the self-same again.

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II: Adventures in metaphor and metonymy But speaking of legs, and of what lies or doesn’t lie between them, did you know that crossing one’s legs in a certain fashion—at the ankle, not at the knee—is the single best way “to give the world the assurance of a man” while sitting? I myself was told this once, in so many words. Sitting comfortably enough at my desk in an eighth-grade classroom, minding my own business— albeit crossing my legs the other way, not at the ankle but at the knee—I suddenly heard a cackle of cultural intervention, the voice of the gender police: a concerned classmate, who happened to be a boy, pointed out to the rest of the class that “Thomas” was “sitting like a girl.”2 Too bad we weren’t studying semiotics in this disciplinary setting. If we had been, I might have been able to respond to my classmate’s panoptical observation in some other way than desperately repositioning my signifying limbs, assuming too late the appropriately gendered posture. I might have been able to turn to my interpellating tormentor and ask why he assumed that any particular way of arranging one’s legs constituted an indexical sign of some pre-existing chromosomal cause, why he assumed any natural bond, motivated connection, or inevitable relation between the gestural and the genital. I might have pointed out that signs of “sitting like” boys or girls are not “positive terms” with fixed, biologically determined contents but are socially conventional signifiers that “mean” only in differential relation to each other. I might have suggested that crossing one’s legs one way signifies sitting “like a boy” not because of any single thing that lies between a boy’s legs but only because crossing them the other way signifies sitting “like a girl.” And if these choice words hadn’t been enough to earn me an after-school ass-kicking, I might even have announced that since “everything in language is negative” anyway, nothing positively causal lies between the legs of any human subject, boy or girl: with a precocious nod to Lacan’s “Signification of the Phallus,” I might have mentioned that nothing “truly” lies between any of our legs but lies—contingent fictions of sex—regardless of whether any one of us really “has what it takes” down there or not. Or I might have lighted on the word “like” in my classmate’s accusation that I was sitting “like a girl” to launch into a discussion of similarity and contiguity as these physical conditions correspond to the tropes of metaphor and metonymy in structural

2

This encounter occurred at the same institution where I witnessed the “positive” dancing of the kid I’m calling Lil’ Jim Crow, as narrated at the end of Lesson Six. The kid in this story was named Lynn, and I’ve always wondered how his having been given a name that more generally goes to girls in this culture may have fueled his need to join the gender police.

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linguistics; I might have continued along Lacanian lines and “articulated what links metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack” (1966e/2006: 439). But setting aside all thoughts of what I might have cleverly said back then, I will now get back on track by launching into—guess what?—a discussion of similarity and contiguity as they correspond to metaphor and metonymy in structural linguistics, not only because it is now relatively safe for me to do so, sitting however the hell I like, but because this discussion will take us closer to understanding how the basic elements of Saussurean linguistics allow Lacan to reboot Freud and end up claiming that the unconscious is structured like a language. We will continue our approach to Lacan’s analogy by considering Saussure’s distinction between syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language. Saussure insists that “in a language-state everything is based on relations” (1959: 122), but he proposes that linguistic elements “acquire” their relations in two distinct ways. On the one hand, words can “acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together.” Since language’s linearity “rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously,” words must be “arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking. Combinations supported by linearity are syntagms. The syntagm is always composed of two or more consecutive units” (1959: 123), and syntagmatic combinations are typically arranged sequentially across the horizontal axis of language. Paradigmatic elements, on the other hand, “are not supported by linearity” (1959: 123)—or at least not by a sequentially horizontal linearity. But these elements can be “associatively” aligned or imaginatively “stacked up” on language’s vertical axis. Paradigmatic or “associative” relations, as Saussure calls them, involve words “that have something in common,” that can be “associated in the memory” (1959: 123). While the real “scene” of syntagmatic relations is their actual occurrence on the sequential chain of discourse, the imaginary “seat” of paradigmatic relations is “in the brain; they are a part of the inner storehouse that makes up the language of each speaker.” Thus syntagmatic relations are conspicuously evident, can be readily discerned and reported, while paradigmatic relations are rather more obscure, seem to require stronger powers of memory and imaginative selection. “The syntagmatic relation,” writes Saussure, “is in praesentia. It is based on two or more terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the [paradigmatic] relation unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series” (1959: 123). To clarify Saussure’s distinction, let’s say that a simple declarative sentence like “This fish is dead” so effectively presents its syntagmatic relations, its horizontally linear sequence of grammatically and syntactically combined

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words, that basically all we have to do to receive this report on piscine morbidity is to grasp conventional grammar and to recognize what the words “fish” and “dead” denote: we don’t have to “remember” very much or “imagine” anything at all; we have only to see/hear the words in their “real time” seriality in order to “get the message.” But if I were to pick these syntagmatic bones clean and offer up the skeletal sequence ridden with absences—as in “This ____ is ____”—then, in order to fill in the blanks, one might imagine a potentially towering series of similar words other than “fish” and “dead,” words that have “something in common,” nouns or adjectives that could be selected from one’s mnemonic “inner storehouse” and inserted into the positions opened by the absences of “fish” and “dead,” that could be substituted for “fish” and “dead” (this bread is stale, this coffee is cold, this lesson is tedious, this tapestry is gorgeous, etc.). And one could imagine those series arranged in vertical “stacks” above the blank spaces vacated by the dead fish (bread, coffee, lesson, tapestry in one stack; stale, cold, tedious, gorgeous, in another). In fact, we pretty much have to imagine those vertical, paradigmatic “stacks” of signifiers because—unlike the actual and evident contiguities and adjacencies of the horizontal chain of syntagms, which we don’t have to imagine but can merely register—the paradigmatic “word-towers” are not really there: they must be imagined, conjured, thunk up. While syntagmatic relations depend upon actual combinations and contiguities that are physically arranged horizontally, in praesentia, paradigmatic relations involve imaginary substitutions and unifications, psychically aligned vertically, in absentia. And this distinction between the physical and the psychical, between the actual and the imaginary, allows the structuralist to align, on the one hand, the syntagmatic—sequential—contiguous—combinative—horizontal axis of language with metonymy and, on the other hand, the paradigmatic| analogous|selective|substitutive|vertical axis of language with metaphor. These alignments are among the most important in structuralist analysis. But Saussure himself doesn’t mention metaphor or metonymy by name in his discussion of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. And in a sense it was not Saussure but our old formalist friend Viktor Shklovsky who laid the foundations for these structuralist alignments when he first distinguished prosaic metonymy from poetical metaphor. Using structuralist terms to rework Shklovsky’s “butterfingers” illustration in the previous lesson, we could say that when the described child has actually gotten butter on her fingers, the employed metonym “butterfingers” is a prosaically realistic syntagm, a horizontal verbal sequence combining the word “butter” with the word “fingers” in a way that mimetically reflects/reports the real physical contiguity of substance to flesh in the present. But when the clean-fingered child has merely dropped an object—she doesn’t really have butter on her

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fingers, it’s only as if she did—the employed metaphor “butterfingers” is a relatively poetic imaginative analogy that substitutes itself for the absence of real substance. But if the “present employment” of metaphor really depends upon “the absence of real substance,” on the negation of positive content, then Saussure, without explicitly naming metaphor as such, implies the utter metaphoricity of language simply by telling us that “everything in language is negative” and that “language is a form and not a substance” (1959: 120, 122). Moreover, when he writes that in considering “the relation that ties together the different parts of syntagms . . . one must also bear in mind the relation that links the whole to its parts” (1959: 124), Saussure implicitly describes the function of synecdoche, the type of metonym that works by linking parts to wholes, and he thus nails the syntagmatic to the metonymic without explicitly naming the latter. Saussure thus allows us to see the anti-realistic “poetry” of antiphysis even in the “prosaic” metonym “butterfingers,” for in that two-term, syntagmatic composition the word “butter” isn’t really a dairy product any more than the word “finger” is really a fleshy digit. In other words, the signifier isn’t really the signified any more than the sign is really the referent. Because in language there are only differences without really positive terms, even metonymical terms can be said to function metaphorically. But because linguistic differences must be strung out along the horizontal or syntagmatic chain of meaning, metaphors themselves are typically sustained or supported metonymically, in sequential combinations. Finally, since language itself works thanks only to the interplay between the paradigmatically metaphorical “poetic” function and the syntagmatically metonymical “prosaic” function, “any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry [alone] or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification.” Thus spake Roman Jakobson—“a key figure in Russian formalism and a major influence on French structuralism” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 210)—a theoretical writer who indeed seems to meld Shklovsky’s “formalist” concerns with Saussure’s “structuralist” investigations. For when Jakobson describes “the poetic function of language” in terms of a “focus on the message for its own sake”—i.e., excluding any other “factors involved in verbal communication” (1960/2007: 857)—his description resonates with both Shklovsky’s “formalist” argument that the prolonged process of perceiving a defamiliarizing message “is an aesthetic end in itself ” (1917/2007: 778) and Saussure’s “structuralist” insistence that “the true and unique object of linguistics is language studied in and for itself” (1959: 232). This double resonance continues when Jakobson writes that the poetic function “cannot be productively studied out of touch with the general problems of language,

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and, on the other hand, [that] the scrutiny of language requires a thorough consideration of its poetic function” (1960/2007: 857). What Jakobson calls “the poetic function” would seem to unite Shklovsky’s aesthetically “wordroughening” techniques with Saussure’s metaphorically “substance-negating” activities, for “by promoting the palpability of signs” (as per Shklovsky’s rough-stuff ), the poetic function always “deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (1960/2007: 857)—i.e., the sign as sign must negate or jettison the object. Note that in the preceding sentence I’ve employed what Jakobson calls “the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selection and combination” (1960/2007: 857). That is, I have selected certain words based on their paradigmatic similarity and sequentially combined those words according to an effectively syntagmatic contiguity, imposing Shklovsky’s “word-roughening” onto Jakobson’s “palpability of signs” and projecting Saussurean “insubstantiality” onto Jakobson’s “fundamental dichotomy.” On the one hand, my “verbal behavior” here instantiates what Jakobson calls metalanguage—roughly, language about language rather than language about objects. On the other hand, my verbosity would seem to relate to Jakobson’s most emphatic description of the poetic function: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (1960/2007: 858). Of course, my sentence is “not really” an axial line of poetry at all. And yet, Jakobson’s description allows me to speak of my sentence as if it were not unrelated to the poetic function, as if it somehow involved the interplay of metaphor (the axis of selection) and metonymy (the axis of combination)—even though, strictly speaking, the sentence contains neither metaphor nor metonymy. The fact that Jakobson’s description of the poetic function allows me to write about my writing as if it were poetry when it’s really no such thing underscores his argument that “when dealing with the poetic function, linguistics cannot limit itself to the field of poetry” (1960/2007: 857). But neither, writes Jakobson—in a key passage that effectively prelubricates Lacan’s insertion of Saussure into Freud—can linguistics limit itself to the “formalist” focus on “the literariness of literature” when dealing with the interplay of metaphor and metonymy, for a competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric, is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social. Thus in an inquiry into the structure of dreams, the decisive question is whether the symbols and the temporal sequences used are based on contiguity (Freud’s metonymic “displacement” and synecdochic “condensation”) or on similarity (Freud’s “identification and symbolism”). (1956/2001: 1268)

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Linking metaphor and metonymy to all “intrapersonal” and “social” symbolic processes, as well as to linguistic “inquiry into the structure of dreams,” Jakobson here effectively paves the way for Lacan’s reading of “the ‘signifierness of dreams’ ” (1966e/2006: 424) and thus for his claim that the unconscious is structured like a language. As we learned in our lesson on taking desire literally, Lacan is keenly concerned with what Jakobson calls “the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects”: he incisively explores antiphysis, the rupture between signification and “the real” that makes all human reality possible. While he would agree with Roland Barthes that “even objects will become speech, if they mean something” (1957/1985: 110–11; Adventures: 78), Lacan insists that some ecstatically or traumatically “real thing” remains missing whenever objects or subjects are ordered to “become” meaningful “speech.” And though he would concur with Barthes’ statement that “every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law . . . which forbids talking about things” (1957/1985: 109; Adventures: 77), Lacan would interject that every object and every subject in the world not only can but must pass from its closed, silent, inarticulate existence to an oral state, open to cultural intervention and social appropriation. Lacan’s message is not that there’s no law forbidding our “talking about things” but that there is a law that forbids our not talking about things, not symbolizing them, that outlaws our not saying “no” to the real; this law, the symbolic order, prohibits our merely being (with or in) certain “real things” rather than differentially meaning them, articulately distancing ourselves from them. Exploiting, moreover, the etymology of the word sex (from the Latin secare, “to cut,” as you’ll recall), Lacan “sexualizes” this articulate distance, this radical cut away from the real; he posits an “Oedipal” dimension to Saussure’s claim that language is the clear-cut “domain of articulations” (1972/1986: 111); he insists that what Jakobson calls “verbal behavior” is always already “sexual behavior” and vice-versa. As we’ve seen, for Lacan, both the symbolic order’s law against inarticulate, undifferentiated “silence” and Saussure’s linguistic law of linearity that “rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously” (Saussure 1959: 123) are structurally analogous to the paternal law of lineage, that “prohibition against incest” which founds all exogamous social orders and which “reveals itself clearly enough as identical to a language order” (1966d/2006: 229). In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan pays homage to Jakobson, whom he duly credits as “one of the leaders of modern linguistics” (1966e/2006: 439). But when it comes to connecting the terms of linguistics to basic Freudian keywords, Lacan corrects and expands upon Jakobson to a large degree. As we’ll see, Lacan indeed connects metonymy to Freudian

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displacement, as Jakobson does above, but he also associates metonymy with desire or lack; moreover, unlike Jakobson, Lacan compares not synecdoche but metaphor to Freud’s condensation and to the psychoanalytic symptom.3 Before examining Lacan’s corrections, however, we’ll need to come to terms with condensation and displacement as these terms function in Freud’s lexicon, specifically in the Traumdeutung, the Interpretation of Dreams. Simply put, Freud’s premise is that a dream represents the fulfillment of a wish. But dreams being what they are, we shall find nothing simple in them, so Freud’s more complicated premise is that a dream represents a compromise formation, the symptomatic work of attempting to satisfy two mutually incompatible desires at once. On the one hand, there’s the dreamer’s unconscious desire, unconscious because repressed, repressed because incompatible with the dreamer’s socially installed ego-coherence or conscious sense of self-esteem; on the other hand, there’s the dreamer’s desire to stay asleep, to remain psychically undisturbed by the emergence of any potentially ego-damaging imagery. In Freud’s view, human sleep involves the relaxation— but not the complete eradication—of the censorship mechanism that holds repressed desire in place. Thus, when we’re soundly asleep, unconscious desire “takes advantage” of our inner censor’s vulnerability and surreptitiously attempts to “have its say.” The unconscious, rather like Cleanth Brooks’ “poet,” very much “wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t [it] say it directly and forthrightly?” (1951/2007: 799). Well, because if the unconscious did directly “speak itself,” its dark matters would most likely set off the censorship mechanism’s alarms and wake the sleeping dreamer up. The unconscious therefore “understands” that to allow any dormant das Ich to continue dreaming (with ego-coherence altered but still basically intact), and thus to keep its own scandalous message from being abruptly “cut off ” in mid-stream, it, the unconscious, must “have its say” only in disguised and distorted forms. The unconscious “knows,” in other words, that “it”—das Es—can have the substance of “its say” only formally. For the unconscious, like language, “is a form and not a substance”: only as a signifying structure, a strangely organized sort of poetry slam, and not as some formlessly bubbling cauldron of biologically instinctual nature, can unconscious desire ever get away with having (something like) its say. 3

While “in medicine, symptoms are the perceptible manifestations of an underlying illness” (as a runny nose is a symptom of the common cold), in psychoanalysis symptoms are treated not as direct indices of organic maladies but as “unnatural” signs of repressed desires. As writes Dylan Evans, “Lacan follows Freud in affirming that neurotic symptoms are formations of the unconscious, and that they are always a compromise between two conflicting desires. Lacan’s originality lies in his understanding of neurotic symptoms in linguistic terms” (1996: 203).

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Let’s say that I unconsciously harbor the standard Oedipal desires to “have a father kill’d, a mother stained,” as Hamlet, mixing possession with commission, ambiguously puts it. If I were to have a dream that “directly and forthrightly” represented the fulfillment of those desires—a dream in which I ecstatically decapitated my father and/or seminally stained my own mother—the image of either atrocity would (let’s hope) be sufficiently disturbing to rupture my slumber, because I really don’t think I’m the kind of person who would enjoy doing or spewing such horrible things. But if I were to dream of sawing off the top of a bottle of pop, or of ejaculating onto the petals of a chrysanthemum, I would probably be able to sleep right through my own witness of these weird but comparatively placid hieroglyphics: my ego-coherence would be protected and, at the same time, “my” unconscious desire would have had something like “its” say. In my dreams, in other words, I(t) enjoy(s) otherwise. In the Traumdeutung, Freud says that dreams work exactly through such distorting mechanisms, through such condensations of ideas and displacements of enjoyment. Freud uses the word Verdichtung or condensation to describe the psychic process by which two or more ideas or images are “paradigmatically” compressed into a single form (my patricidal dream condenses father and bottle; my matri-maculating dream condenses mother and flower). He employs the word Verschiebung or displacement to describe the psychic process by which the “discharge” of forbidden aggression or obscene longing is “syntagmatically” transferred from one element in the dream sequence to another (my daddykilling dream displaces murderous rage away from my father and onto something else, a stupid bottle; my mother-soiling dream transfers seminal abjection away from my mum and onto something else, the lovely petals). It’s all rather poetic, wouldn’t you say? And even if you wouldn’t, Lacan emphatically does, not only stressing the similarity between condensation and metaphor and associating displacement with metonymy— Verdichtung, “condensation,” is the superimposed structure of signifiers in which metaphor finds its field; its name, condensing in itself the word Dichtung, shows the mechanism’s connaturality with poetry, to the extent that it envelops poetry’s own properly traditional function. Verschiebung or “displacement”—this transfer of signification that metonymy displays is . . . represented, right from its first appearance in Freud’s work, as the unconscious’ best means by which to foil censorship. (1966e/2006: 425)

—but also insisting on the traumatically sexual underpinnings of all enveloping tropes, metaphorical or metonymical, of all symbolic processes, intrapersonal or social, of all unconscious desire taken literally, à la lettre.

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One way to understand Lacan’s“Oedipal” take on metaphorical condensation is to turn again to Saussure’s assertion that language’s law of linearity “rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously” (1959: 153). Ordinarily, “realistically” speaking, one could say that this rule against incest— oops, my bad, I mean, against simultaneity, against two “elements” being pronounced as/at on(c)e—generally holds; after all, this is the rule that compels all good writers to keep their letters separate rather than piling them on top of each other (as in the bad experimental “ink-stain” example back in the lesson on taking desire literally). In a “poetically” condensed metaphor, however, it’s as if the rule of linearity were broken by the superimposition of signifiers: in the Oedipal poetry of my dreams, either one of these dark inscriptions—“bottle of pop” or “chrysanthemum”—would seem to break the syntagmatic rule and would seem to allow unconscious desire to enunciate two elements simultaneously (“as one flesh,” so to speak). And this illicit enunciation transpires without das Ich quite catching on to what das Es is actually saying: that I(t) really do(es) want to have “a father kill’d, a mother stained.” Another way to understand metaphorical condensation would be to consider the old trope for old age first trotted out in Aristotle’s Poetics: “He was in the evening of his life.” Here we see the pronounced compression of a lengthy, four-term analogy (as evening is to day, so old age is to life) into a shorter, two-term expression (evening of life). In this metaphorical condensation, the luxury sedan of— as A is to B so C is to D

—becomes the compact two-seater A of D: linear sequentiality is abrogated in that we “jump” directly (if diagonally) across the (here invisible) line from A to D; moreover, by virtue of that “imaginative leap” or line-crossing a certain number of substantially “real terms” are negated or occulted from the proposition (“day” and “old age” are absent or missing from “evening of life” in much the same way as real butter is nowhere to be found in Shklovsky’s metaphorical “butterfingers”). Note that all these condensations involve the substitution of words for other words. Evening subs for old age; pop as bottle subs for pop as father; the final syllable of chrysanthemum stands in for a name bestowed upon my poor mother, etc. “One word for another: this is the formula for metaphor,” writes Lacan, “and if you are a poet you will make it into a game and produce a continuous stream, nay, a dazzling weave of metaphors” (1966e/2006: 422). And yet, the meaningful continuity of any verbal stream, however metaphorically dazzling, will always depend upon the horizontal drift of metonymy, for “metonymy is based on the

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word-to-word nature” of the syntagmatic thread of verbal behavior. Lacan thus “designate[s] as metonymy the first aspect of the actual field the signifier constitutes, so that meaning may assume a place there” (1966e/2006: 421). Because any “meaning” not only “may” but must assume its place in line, because the “word-to-word” basis of metonymy can be associated with the linear and sequential structure of the completely “woven” sentence, and because we read sentences not “all at once” but only by moving or transferring our attention, our perceptual cathexis or investment, from one word to the next along the chain of contiguous signifiers, Lacan associates the syntagmatic metonymy of structural linguistics with the somnambulant displacement of the Freudian dreamwork. Lacan also links the substitutive, word-for-word condensations of metaphor with “the very mechanism by which symptoms, in the analytic sense, are determined.” Between the enigmatic signifier of sexual trauma and the term it comes to replace in a signifying chain, a spark flies that fixes in a symptom—a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element— the signification, that is inaccessible to the conscious subject, by which the symptom may be dissolved. (1966e/2006: 431)

Moreover, Lacan associates the “word-to-word nature” of metonymy with “literal” desire. He writes that “the enigmas that desire . . . poses for any sort of ‘natural philosophy’ are based on no other derangement of instinct than the fact that it [desire] is caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally extending toward the desire for something else” (1966e/2006: 431). Desire taken literally is always desire for something else because meaning always lacks being, because “no signification can be sustained except by reference to another signification” (1966e/2006: 415), because “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1959: 120; Adventures: 45), etc. “Whence we can say that it is in the chain of the signifier that meaning [emptily] insists, but that none of the chain’s elements [positively] consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 419). Mixing, then, the adventures of metaphor and metonymy with the insistence of the letter in the unconscious, Lacan insists that “there is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire” than to imagine that “it is the truth of what this desire has been in his history that the subject cries out through his symptom” (1966e/2006: 431). And that, for crying out loud, is why Lacan imagines that the unconscious is structured like a language. But for Lacan the “crying game” of the “talking cure” involves a fundamental question—a question of the relation between the idea that the unconscious is structured like a language and the history of

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a subject who has conventionally been expected to posture like a boy or a girl, to signify as a boy or a girl, to take its place in one line or the other whenever two different lines form. Like linear language for Saussure, sex for Lacan is a form and not a substance; for him, linguistic structure always involves this “binary” question of sexual difference, the metaphorical/metonymical “question of being and . . . its lack” (1966e/2006: 439). As we’ll see in the next section (another word, come to think of it, like “sex,” derived from secare), the question of sexual difference is in Lacan’s view the question of being versus meaning, of being versus having something infamously called . . .

III: “the phallus”—for lack of a worser word The first thing one wants to say about the phallus is that it isn’t the penis. It’s not an anatomical “object” of any kind, and “still less is it the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes.” Rather, as Lacan insists in “The Signification of the Phallus,” “the phallus is a signifier . . . the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as signifier” (1966f/2006: 579). The phallus stands for what “meaning effects as a whole” are destined to stand for: namely, that man cannot aim at being whole (at the “total personality”. . . ) once the play of displacement and condensation to which he is destined in the exercise of his functions marks his relation, as a subject, to the signifier. The phallus is the privileged signifier of this mark in which the role of Logos is wedded to the advent of desire. (1966f/2006: 581)4

In other words, what “the phallus” means is that Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” can pretty much go hang. For the phallus designates the fact that anatomy

4

“Logos is Greek for ‘word,’ as well as truth, reason, logic, law. Since Plato, logos has stood as the transcendent grounding principle of order and reason that confers meaning on discourse. It constitutes the origin of truth” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 172–3). Correspondingly, logocentrism is “a word coined by Jacques Derrida . . . to describe the form of metaphysics that understands writing as merely a representation of speech, which is privileged because the utterance is present simultaneously to both speaker and listener, a situation that seems to guarantee the transmission of meaning” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 172). Now, because Lacan couples “the phallus” as a “privileged signifier” with “the Logos” as “origin of truth,” he stands accused, by Derrida and no few others, of being not only phallocentric but, worse, phallogocentric, a term which Eagleton suggests that “we might roughly translate as ‘cocksure’ ” (1983/1996:164). We will, to be sure, have more to say about phallogocentrism later on. For phallocentrism in general, sans the logos, see Lara Stevens’ entry in the BHLCT.

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isn’t “destiny” for any subject of human reality, whether possessed of penis or clit; it “means” that whatever any of us has or doesn’t, none of us can ever “aim at being whole,” at being all there, in the “exercise” of our “functions” within the domain of articulation. Because there is no “natural history” of human desire, because our destiny is forever subject to the play of metaphorical condensation and metonymical displacement, the only “wholes” we can ever “aim at” are grammatically completed sentences—even if no single, fully predicated sentence (and certainly not this one!) can ever really satisfy its speaker’s desire for completion. The phallus thus not only “isn’t the organ—penis or clitoris—that it symbolizes” but “stands for” nothing other than the fact that it isn’t. Signifying nothing but its own disappearance, the phallus isn’t anything and isn’t everything but “stands for” the fact that “everything in language is negative” (Saussure 1959: 120). Without actually being “a natural fact,” the phallus stands for the fact that language is by nature fictional; it really symbolizes nothing but the fact that the symbolic isn’t the real. In the most obviously “sexual” terms, the phallus not only isn’t the penis but signifies the fact that the signifier “penis” isn’t the signified “penis.” The word “penis” isn’t a real dick any more than the word “clitoris” gets to be a real clit. If words like “penis” and “clitoris” were really dicks and clits, then one could caress, kiss, lick and perchance excite and/or arouse them; one could erotically rub the words together, like sticks, and make a sort of fire. The phallus signifies the fact that one can’t. The phallus signifies the hard fact that the word “penis” lacks a real penis, that the word “clitoris” lacks the actual item. But the phallus also signifies the seemingly “non-sexual” fact that a phrase like, say, “stick of butter” isn’t really a stick of butter. In other words, for Lacan, the shadow of the phallus extends across the entire field of signification, designating “meaning effects as a whole” whether any real organs or buttered holes are involved in the signifying act or not: the ostentatiously “sexual” word “phallus” signifies the seemingly “non-sexual” fact that “the signifier” qua signifier lacks “the signified,” that the word qua word lacks “the real thing,” that the subject qua subject lacks the undifferentiated real. Lacan’s phallus is thus the specifically privileged “signifier of lack” in general. The idea that the Lacanian phallus signifies these linguistic negations, these sad-assed “facts of life”—it isn’t, one can’t—means that the phallus is “not unrelated,” as Lacan puts it, to the bar that separates signifier from signified in the Saussurean algorithm— S — s

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—which “is to be read,” Lacan writes, “as follows: signifier over the signified, ‘over’ corresponding to the bar separating the two levels” (1966e/2006: 415). But while Saussure reads the algorithm’s horizontal line as uniting signifier with signified, comparing “the two levels” to the recto and verso of a single sheet of paper, Lacan likens the same line to a bar of prohibition, a significant barrier instantiating the aforementioned negations: it isn’t, one can’t. To show the difference between Saussure’s paper-thin “line” and his own thicker and longer “bar,” Lacan pulls out what he calls Saussure’s “faulty illustration” of the signifier/signified dispensation—the signifying word tree suspended over a horizontal line that joins the word to what’s below it: an arboreal icon representing the signified concept of a tree—and he “replace[s] this illustration with another, which can be considered more correct” (1966e/2006: 416): the words gentlemen and ladies situated above a horizontal bar that separates them from “the image of two twin doors” below, the floating words indicating alternative entrances on the nether side of the bar, the twin doors themselves marking the physically identical but “sexually differentiated” places where “gentlemen” and “ladies” are supposed to go, whenever they really “have to go.” As Lacan announces: the image of two twin doors . . . symbolize[s], with the private stall offered Western man for the satisfaction of his natural needs when away from home, the imperative he seems to share with the vast majority of primitive communities that subjects his public life to the laws of urinary segregation” (1966e/2006: 417)

Still shaking that Saussurean tree, Lacan goes on to play “scrabble” with the French word arbre, anagrammatically transforming it into a barre and thus laying bare human reality as the “meaning effect” of primal repression, the laboriously primordial sacrifice of the real (and the arboreal) to the sociosymbolic order—the domains of articulation, incest prohibition, urinary segregation, and so on. In Lacan’s view, the social imperatives of language universally bar our way to any simple and undifferentiated “satisfaction” of “natural needs,” so that we “castrated” subjects of the signifier, constitutively sawed off from merely animal nature, can’t, like lemurs, simply swing, shit, or piss from trees.5 Lacan’s saw is that everything in language is negative, based

5

“Countering transphobia is shitty work”: As we’ve been seeing, in Lacan’s view, language or the symbolic order orchestrates our constitutively human difference from “the Real” as a “sexual difference”; he conflates the so-called “Real of Sexual Difference” (Žižek, Adventures: 247–268) with our linguistic difference from the Real. In other words, the “symbolic order” qua “order to symbolize” compels the parlêtre or speaking being not

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on this primordially prohibitive bar, and so everyone who wants to be anyone in our world of words must be made to mean, must consent to “castration” as “sexual difference” from the real, must abide by the laws of urinary segregation separating ladies from gents, must take his or her place in one line or the other in front of the “really identical” twin doors: all this “not-all” is what the phallus, as the “privileged” signifier of lack, signifies for Lacan.6

6

simply “to be” but “to mean”—and never “to mean” simply but always to make meaning as “a man” or “a woman” as per “the laws of urinary segregation” imposed by the twin bathroom doors and other “order[s] and norms [that] must be instituted which tell the subject what a man or a woman must do” (Lacan 1966h/2006: 720). The cross-identified subject who doesn’t follow the(se) heteronormative symbolic order(s), who transgresses or attempts to repeal the laws of urinary segregation, that criminal pisser who, like Kristeva’s abject outlaw, “doesn’t respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 1982: 4), who dares “to be” and “to mean” as “a man” and “a woman” at the same time, appears to abolish the merely symbolic distinction between the really identical bathroom doors, and hence to shatter the fictional but constitutively humanizing difference between the Symbolic and the Real, to blur the line between signifier and signified, to signify psychic dissolution as such, to signify the end of significance itself. And then it gets worse: In the transphobic imaginary, the trans subject who dares to “go” through the “wrong door” seems not only to threaten vaunted heteronormative notions of privacy but also to erase distinctly hygienic lines between properly socialized bodies and all the actually ungendered waste matters, fluid or solid, deposited on the other side of any door gone through. Here indifference to the difference between one door and the other suggests indifference to the difference between the “clean and proper” and the abjectly “other” side of any designated bathroom door. And so, given that the human corpse is “the utmost in abjection” (Kristeva 1982: 4), the transgender subject seems to unsettle and to sully “the limit between life and death” by immigrating across the border between female and male. In this murderous logic, the immigrant “tranny” gets figured as abject “zombie,” as ambulant excrement, and thus as perfect target for (typically masculinist) political violence. For as Oren Gozlan observes, “the bathroom is not just a place of satisfaction [of real bodily needs] but also a place of frustration and hate where excrements represent both abjection and aggression” (2017: 455). And as Sheila Cavanagh puts it, “Identity-based borders, like public toilets, are frantic zones of aggressive projection whereby one person’s disavowed difficulties with gender get projected onto others, often in aggressive ways”—which is why she opines that “countering transphobia” can be such “shitty work” (2017: 330). But speaking of privilege, it’s surely a sign of my unacknowledged own that these elaborations on Lacan in the first edition of Ten Lessons lack any discussion of the relation between the laws of urinary segregation and the laws of racial segregation. In Desiring Whiteness, Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks writes that “racial difference must be distinguished from, but read in relation to, sexual difference” (2000: 7), but the obverse, that sexual difference must be distinguished from but read in relation to racial difference, is also the case, particularly when reading about Lacan’s famous “twin doors.” For as the very title of Maia Boswell’s 1999 essay “ ‘Ladies,’ ‘Gentlemen,’ and ‘Colored’: ‘The Agency of (Lacan’s Black) Letter’ in the Outhouse” reminds us, in some areas of “public life” there were not simply two doors but three. And as Elizabeth Abel points out, “if ‘colored’ bathrooms were sometimes ungendered, ‘white’ ones were always gender differentiated” (1999: 452): in other words, gender differentiation can be a sign of white privilege, not only “part of what humanizes individuals in contemporary culture” (Butler 2004: 44) but part of what dehumanizes or animalizes Black people in colonial/Jim Crow culture.

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But hold on here: even if we accept linguistic anthropogenesis as radical antiphysis; even if we grant that language must be articulated and therefore necessarily involves an inaugural separation of the speaking subject from the undifferentiated real; even if we swallow the line that being a speaking subject necessarily involves a haunting sense of incompletion, of never really being fully here nor there, why in God’s name must we think of articulation, separation, incompletion, etc., in the specifically “sexuated” terms of “castration”? Moreover, if we must select a single signifier to signify the fact that the signifier isn’t the signified; if we must privilege one symbol to symbolize the fact that symbols aren’t real; if we must designate one unit of meaning to designate “meaning effects as a whole,” why the actual fuck does it have to be “the phallus”? Lacan in fact addresses these questions with a winking nod towards “the fuck,” towards copulation, both “real” and “literal.” As he puts it: One could say that this signifier [the phallus] is chosen as the most salient of what can be grasped in sexual intercourse [copulation] as real, as well as the most symbolic, in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent in [discursive] intercourse to the (logical) copula [the “linking” form of the verb “to be”—is—is of course called the copula]. One could also say that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation. All of these remarks still merely veil the fact that [the phallus] can play its role only when veiled, that is, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, once it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of the signifier. The phallus is the signifier of this very Aufhebung, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance. (1966f/2006: 581)

Boswell reads Lacan’s “Agency of the Letter” alongside Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, while Abel starts with Lacan’s “Agency” and then examines a varied set of b&w photographs documenting racially segregated “bathroom doors and drinking fountains” from the Jim Crow era, even mentioning “one of the Colored Waiting Room signs at the Rome, Georgia, bus station” (1999: 439): Ah, Rome, GA: the site of my birth, and, as previously narrated, the scene of my “educational” encounters with the horrible dancer Lil’ Jim Crow and with Lieutenant Lynn of the local gender gendarmerie. Now, for more on race and Lacan’s “Agency of the Letter”—including speculation that Lacan wanted to let the phrase “urinary segregation” resonate with the “racial segregation” that prevailed in the 1950’s American South (which is why he also refers in this écrit to the figure of the “negress,” to a woman waiting “on the auction block,” to the subject’s being “a slave of language,” etc.), see both the above-mentioned Abel and Boswell; Cavanagh (2014); and the opening chapters of Marriot (2021).

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What we can take this strikingly Hegelian language to mean is that language itself never means anything except by virtue of the real’s being stricken with signification. When the symbolic order strikes, signification removes itself from and erects itself above “the real” which disappears from it, which is “primally repressed” or driven into “latency” by it. Once language cuts into the signifiable real, “everything” becomes no longer simply signifiable but irrevocably significant. Once language cuts in, “everything” must split along one side or the other of the horizontal bar separating the signifier from the signified, and for Lacan this symbolic segregation is “not unrelated” to the conventional social imperative that “everybody” must flock to the left or the right of the vertical line separating urinating ladies from gents. Once language cuts in and we’re made to “stand in line” in the public domain of articulation/urination, every erstwhile “total whole” and every formerly “oceanic feeling” sexually divides into signifiers and signifieds— signifiers that are barred from being signifieds, signs that are separated from formlessly immediate experience, words that bar us from any simple satisfaction of any of our “natural needs when away from home.” Granted, none of the preceding fully answers the question of why “the phallus” must be “the privileged signifier” of the real’s necessary disappearance from signification, but that’s because the phallus ensures that nothing can ever fully answer that question or fully satisfy anyone who asks. Lacan, however, does lay out some strategically unsatisfying answers in “The Signification of the Phallus,” using his “privileged signifier” to rewrite Freud’s basic Oedipal scenario. To employ a couple of titles, let’s say that in Freud’s account “The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” is brought about by “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.” In Freud’s terms, “dissolving” one’s Oedipus complex involves letting go of one’s desire to possess the mother and dispatch the father. Initially, all of us polymorphously perverse little children—blithely oblivious to the aforementioned anatomical distinction and its possible psychical consequences—share this same desire, “boys” and “girls” alike (both, that is, want to “be” with the mother, which means that the little boy’s pleasure principle is from a certain perspective already conveniently “heterosexual,” the little girl’s not so much). Eventually, both of “the sexes” will be led to “dissolve” their complexes, albeit for distinctly different reasons, and these contrasting dissolutions pave the way for us to arrive at our “normal” heterosexual masculinity or femininity. On the one hand, dissolving the Oedipus complex “like a boy” involves castration anxiety: perceiving a body anatomically distinct from his own, misrecognizing absence as violent deprivation (the price paid for some infraction of the rules), fearing similar punishment for his own unruly impulses, the little boy

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gives up on his mother to safeguard his bodily totality and represses his aggression against the father in favor of a self-protective identification, anxiety thereby assuaged. On the other hand, in Freud’s narrative, dissolving the Oedipus complex “like a girl” involves penisnied or “penis envy”: perceiving a body anatomically distinct from her own, falling for an unfavorable comparison between her clitoris and the other’s supposedly more impressive appendage and thus feeling corporeally slighted, the little girl is supposed to disinvest libidinally in her own active (i.e., “masculine”) clitoral self-stimulation in favor of passive (i.e., “feminine”) vaginal receptivity to outside intervention; she is supposed to give up on her likewise “deficient” mama, who doesn’t seem to have what she lacks either, and turn instead to the fantasy father-figure who apparently is better equipped to give her what she really wants—which, as it happens, is less a penis per se than what that real organ’s “turgidity” and “vital flow” might one fine day spell out: the baby (albeit preferably with a penis attached) as the ultimate indexical sign of the big girl’s “womanly” fulfillment.7 Now, Freud’s accounts are obviously quite problematic and have been attacked from a number of fronts, not all of them feminist. But as some feminist theorists have long recognized, Freud’s accounts do possess the great

7

“Little girls don’t have toothpicks”: And here’s another story set in Rome, GA. Some years ago, I attended a family Thanksgiving gathering there. Present were my parents, my sister (nine years my elder), her husband, and their three children: Chris, Amy, and Jay. The T-day meal had concluded, and everyone had gotten up to mill about before assuming their assigned or expected positions in the divisions of labor and/or relaxation. Amy, still in grade-school at the time, had somehow managed to procure for herself a post-prandial toothpick, and she was, in actual fact, walking around with said toothpick in her mouth. Her father, having observed this behavior, walked over to my niece and leaned down to issue the following statement: “Amy—little girls don’t have toothpicks in their mouths.” As phrased, the utterance is interesting on a number of fronts. First of all, and as should be obvious in our present context, Amy’s father was most basically saying that a little girl, as a little girl, does not have a penis. Not having a penis is what defines her, settles her fate, anatomically secures her destiny, and so a little girl’s not having a penis naturally entails that she also does not “have a toothpick in her mouth,” such display being the “natural” prerogative of bona fide penis possessors like brothers Chris and Jay. But what may be less obvious is the way my brother-in-law, in laying down the law, was also, to use Althusser’s language, imposing an obviousness as an obviousness. It didn’t matter that his statement obviously wasn’t true, was visibly counter-factual: for Amy was a little girl, and Amy did have a toothpick in her mouth. But the real (gender) trouble was of course that it was Amy’s actual behavior that was being represented as counter-factual, unnatural. Her father didn’t say “little girls shouldn’t go around with toothpicks in their mouths” or “Daddy doesn’t want you to have a toothpick in your mouth” or just an unadorned command to “lose” the toothpick. Rather, and to allude to the language of Roland Barthes, my sister’s husband did his mythological bit to turn history into nature: he presented a paternal prohibition as if it were a natural fact (when the actual fact was the opposite of what he said).

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virtue of being accounts.8 In other words, despite that unfortunate “anatomy is destiny” slogan, Freud demonstrably views normative heterosexual masculinity and femininity not as biologically determined outcomes but rather as complicated and fragile “formations of fantasy” for which speculative accounts are precisely what need to be given, even if the accounts themselves are inevitably incomplete and unsatisfactory, no less “fantasmatic” than that which they purport to explain. Lacan, in any case, rewrites and revises Freud’s Oedipal narratives, focusing less on the child’s longing for the mother and more on its efforts to ascertain and somehow to be what it imagines the mother desires. In the Lacanian scenario, the child—boy or girl—still wants its mother, wants her to be its everything, but the child also wants to position itself to be the mother’s one and only thing, to be the sole object of the mother’s desire, without any annoying competition. The child’s desire to be the mother’s desire, however, presupposes that the mother in fact desires, that she wants or lacks something, and the phallus is potentially “not unrelated” to the child’s pressing question regarding the mother’s “enigmatic” desire: what does she want (me to be)? Significantly, the phallus enters the picture if and when this “emotionally necessary” presupposition of maternal lack (she must want something if she is to want anything like me) gets mapped onto the “standard interpretation” of anatomical distinction that takes the mother to be “castrated” (she seems not to have a thing like that thing down there). Of course, the “standard interpretation” is not the only interpretation available even among perverse little children (or male psychoanalysts); this conjectural reading of maternal “castration” is neither inevitable nor universal—not even for Lacan, who

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As Gayle Rubin writes: “Psychoanalysis contains a unique set of concepts for understanding men, women, and sexuality. It is a theory of sexuality in human society. Most important, psychoanalysis provides a description of the mechanisms by which the sexes are divided and deformed, of how bisexual, androgynous infants are transformed into boys and girls. Psychoanalysis is a feminist theory manqué” (Adventures: 166). In relation to the specific matter of Freud’s “misogynist” speculation about penisnied, Mari Ruti writes: “For a long time, Sigmund Freud has been accused of being a misogynist because he claimed that women suffer from penis envy. I remember that when I first came across this idea in college, I threw Freud’s book across my dorm room and declared him ‘a fucking idiot.’ I don’t blame anyone for having the same reaction: surely there’s something outrageous about claiming that when a little girl sees her brother’s penis, she instantly starts to covet it because she recognizes her own inferiority. But after studying feminist theory and related fields for three decades, I’ve come to see that it’s possible to spin Freud’s claim differently: in a society that rewards the possessor of the penis with obvious political, economic, and cultural benefits [like, say, the benefit of being allowed freely to take up a toothpick—CT], women would have to be a little obtuse not to envy it; they would have to be a little obtuse not to want the social advantages that automatically accrue to the possessor of the penis, particularly if he happens to be white” (2018a: ix).

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stresses the fantasmatic dimension of the “presupposition of lack” and who fully understands that female bodies aren’t “non-fictionally” incomplete (they really lack lack, as he puts it). Nonetheless, Lacan suggests that if maternal lack is presupposed, and “if the mother’s desire is for the phallus, the child wants to be the phallus in order to satisfy her desire” (1966f/2006: 582). Now, those are some pretty big “ifs.” And before we jump to any ludicrous suppositions about what being the mother’s “little thing” might entail—the child as some sort of supplemental “strap-on” joyously jutting out from maternal loins, for example—let’s examine the logic of this “phallic fantasy” more closely. The child in question, boy or girl, in wanting to be what the mother wants, supposedly wants to “complete” the mother by becoming what she seems (in fantasy) to lack. Again, this fantasy must presuppose a wanting mother in order to generate the corresponding fantasy of the wanted child. On the one hand, the opposing fantasy of the unwanting mother—the “phallic” mother as “total personality”—is basically unsupportable for the child, simply because there’s no comforting or desirable place for the child to be in that fantasy. On the other hand, the fantasy that “the mother’s desire is” for a single thing that the child can somehow be “in order to satisfy her desire” isn’t going to pan out very well either, at least not if the phallus ends up being her supposed desire, because another player’s putative possession of this desideratum must spoil the child’s fantasy of completion. In other words, if “the father” already seems to have it, “I” can’t possibly be it. My bitter recognition that “the father” seems to have what the mother seems to lack pretty much rules out the possibility of my ever being the sole object of her desire, rules out her being “my everything” and my being her only thing. And this exclusive rule, if I manage to accept it, ensures that “the phallus” will have functioned metaphorically as a veritable law of “the father.” This is why Lacan thinks of the “phallic function” in terms of paternal metaphor and why I have placed the name of the paternal spoiler in ironic or “de-realizing” quotation marks above. For it isn’t the real father or anything involving that swell fellow’s actual “apparatus” that’s decisive here. Rather, “the name of the father” figures as a structural position, as the third term that seems to bar dyadic “completion” in the Oedipally “incestuous” sense, that seems to block any real sexual reunion of mother and child or any “oceanic” merger of the ego with the real. Strictly and metaphorically speaking, no “real father” or “real man” ever need occupy that structural position. Not the real father but the “name of the father” (nom du père) functions as if it were the “law of the father,” as if it were the “no of the father” (non du père), as if the primordial “no to the real” that makes naming necessary and hence human reality possible issued from the loins and the lips of “the father” at the same time, the paternal metaphor thus condensing what “the father” seems to have

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(the “right answer” to the question of the mother’s desire) with what “he” seems to say about the child’s bid to satisfy the mother’s desire (no fucking way!). It’s by virtue of this metaphorical condensation of “seeming to have” with “seeming to say” that the nom/non du père is “not unrelated” to the phallus that is “not unrelated” to the bar that separates signifier from signified in Saussure’s triadic algorithm.9

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“I can’t breathe!”: For Lacan the horizontal bar between the signifier and the signified is “not unrelated” to “the phallus” and so “not unrelated” to the sexually differentiating vertical line drawn between the twin bathroom doors, if not to that “other” vertical line— obviously “not unrelated” to what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the color line”—segregating (as per the discussion above) white “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” from gender-undifferentiated and thereby dehumanized “Coloreds” back in the days of old Jim Crow. But if all these directional (structural and historical) analogies hold, then the horizontal bar or barrier or barricade between the signifier and the signified, which maintains all the differences, however drawn, between the sign and the referent, the symbol and the thing, meaning and being, subject and object, human reality and the real, would also be “not unrelated” to “the color line.” Which is why Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks writes in Desiring Whiteness that “racial difference must be distinguished from, but read in relation to, sexual difference” (2000: 7), and vice-versa, whenever we’re grappling with Lacan. And these intersectional points might help us understand what Fanon-inspired Afropessimists, Black Nihilists, and others working in what Fred Moten calls the “Black Radical Tradition” mean when they argue that “meaning” in the modern world is constitutively and violently anti-black. In his 2015 essay “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope,” for example, Calvin Warren writes “Black nihilism articulates the particular vulnerability of blacks to incoherence and fragility in an anti-black world. Meaning itself is an aspect of antiblackness, such that meaning is lost for the black; blacks live in a world of absurdity, and this existential absurdity is meaning for the world. Meaninglessness is really all there is (or we could say that ‘real’ meaning for the world is utter meaninglessness). . . . The very structure of meaning in the modern world—signifier, signified, signification, and sign— depends on anti-black violence for its constitution” (226). Following along these lines, I’d like to return to a matter I’ve been harping on, to the question of the difference between “being” and “meaning.” In keeping with Lacan, I’ve been repeating the idea that while “we” may initially desire “to be” (to be the phallus for the mother who seems to “us” to lack it), “we” are compelled instead “to mean,” to enter/follow the symbolic order as per the Law of the Father. And while such is indeed the (Oedipal/heteronormativizing) case for many of us, or maybe for some “part” of all of us, the obverse also holds: part of each of us wants to mean, to enter the world of meaning, but fears being pulled back down into “meaninglessly real” being. In one reading, the tension between these two desires plays out within our individual psyches. In another reading, this “inner division” gets projected or played out along the lines of sexual and/or racial difference, so that while some of us want to be but are compelled to mean, “others” want to mean but are forced instead to be. Such, again, is Fanon’s point when he opens “The Fact of Blackness” with the lines “I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.” Fanon speaks to what it means to be “sealed into [a] crushing objecthood” (Adventures 67). To put this another way, we might consider how the being/meaning distinction could also be cast in terms of “matter” (thingy bodily stuff ) vs. “mattering” (being considered significant or important), and how the being/ meaning or matter/mattering division plays out otherwise for those like Fanon who desire “to mean” but are forced instead “to be” things, those who want their #MeToo

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So the phallus in its “poetical function” as paternal metaphor substitutes itself for the mother’s desire. This substitution leaves the child, boy or girl, with nothing to be (for the mother) and everything to mean (including the mother). For if she herself respects the law of the father, the mother will no longer want the child to be her little thing; she will no longer want the child (to want) to be with her in a comfortably closed circle of mellifluous sound and sense, homeostatically pleasurable to those two alone but meaningless to the “outside world.” Rather, she will want the child not to be but to mean, to make intelligible sounds that “he”—and the “larger system” that he “stands for”—will be able to understand, to recognize; she will not want the child to be her thing but to substitute words for things, even if the very first of those things was really her. The phallus, then, is not a thing but seems to substitute itself for the deprivational fact that words must substitute for missing persons and lost objects. In other words, the phallus—for lack of a worser word—is nothing but the word that seems to stand for the fact that “we must accept castration” (Lacan 2008: 41). And what it means “to accept castration” in Lacan’s teaching is to accept the fact that we must be made to mean, that none us of can ever be (with or in) or have “the real thing” ever again.10 All of which would seem to take us back to the question of “the sexes” (and, if you’ve been carefully following the footnotes in this lesson so far, also to the matter of “the races”). For apparently the symbolic order has never allowed all of us boys and girls ever to mean equally “as one” undifferentiated humanity. Or at least no dominant symbolic order or collective cultural mythology on record has ever exactly encouraged us to understand our

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truth-claims “to mean” but are silenced, coerced into “being” mute objects, those who wanted their Black lives to matter but whose living bodies were reduced to inert facticity, those who at the barest of minimums wanted to be allowed to breathe but whose very last words signified that they could not. To put this point yet another way, and to quote Lewis R. Gordon’s Fear of Black Consciousness, there are different and particular ways in which the statement “to mean and to be are not the same” (2022: 37) is universally true. “You would not treat human beings this way”: To “accept castration” in the Lacanian sense involves consenting to the fundamental incompletion that is our common lot as parlêtres or “speaking beings”: in other words, and alluding to what are now the final words of these Ten Lessons, we human beings are all “not-all” in language. But “castration” in Lacan’s symbolic sense does NOT correspond to castration in the real historical sense, which means that none of us has to “accept” and none of us should ignore the real history that Nikole Hannah-Jones describes in The 1619 Project: “During the height of racial terror in this country, Black Americans were not merely killed in mob attacks and lynchings but castrated, burned alive, and dismembered, with their body parts displayed in storefronts and strewn across lawns in Black communities. This violence was meant to terrify and control Black people, but perhaps just as importantly, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: you would not treat human beings this way” (2021: 32).

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anthropogenetic difference from the real except in terms of some putatively “real difference” between “the sexes” (or “the races”)—whether the difference be enforced by conventional laws compelling urinary (or racial) segregation or by other myths that attempt to transform “the history of sexuality” into an essential or metaphysical ensemble of “natural” facts. Compelling us to perform cultural contingencies as if they were absolute necessities, the regnant symbolic order orders each and every one of us to mean “as” ladies or gentlemen, “like” boys or girls (or sometimes, as we’ve noted, like “Coloreds”), in the positive or negative terms of purely masculine or feminine “subject positions”—and, if faithfully following “our” orders, “we” continue to “regularly punish those who don’t do their gender right” (Butler 2004: 44), to punitively abject “those who fall out of normative gender, sexual, and racialized alignment” (Cavanagh 2014: 323).11 Now, addressing the question about Lacan’s position on these matters involves determining whether his rethinking of Freud through structural linguistics supports or suspends the regnant symbolic order, whether his work critically describes or forcefully prescribes phallogocentrism and the workings of the patriarchal unconscious. In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan writes that one can indicate the structures that govern the relations between the sexes by referring simply to the phallus’ function. These relations revolve around a being and a having which, since they refer to a signifier, the phallus, have contradictory effects: they give the subject reality in this signifier, on the one hand, but render unreal the relations to be signified, on the other. This is brought about by the intervention of a seeming [paraître] that replaces the having in order to protect it, in one case, and to mask the lack thereof, in the other, and whose effect is to completely project the ideal or typical manifestations of each of the sexes’ behavior, including the act of copulation itself, into the realm of comedy. (1966f/2006: 582)

Here Lacan would seem to disabuse us of the notion that the projected ideals of masculinity or femininity should ever be taken seriously or that he himself 11

The history not of “twin” but of “triplet” bathroom doors—Ladies, Gentlemen, Coloreds— helps (but does not fully) explain the fact that, even (or especially) when being hypersexualized, “Black men are often gendered feminine (and thus emasculated) while black women are often gendered masculine and seen to be unfeminine in racist discourses positing both outside (or, rather, beyond) the binary” (Cavanagh 2014: 332). For more on how Black men can be simultaneously “hypersexualized” and “emasculated,” see the next footnote.

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reads any “typical manifestations” of sexuated behaviors as absolute necessities rather than as broadly comic contingencies. In stipulating the way those manifestations “revolve” around a being, a having, a seeming, etc., Lacan, as I take it, means that when the child “accepts castration,” accepts that it cannot “be” (the phallus) for the mother but must make meanings instead, the child is also made to understand that it must eventually make “a man” or “a woman” of itself, that it must “mean” or send itself through one “door” or the other, “like” a boy or a girl. The child accepts, however gradually or grudgingly, that it can’t want to end up being the phallus for the mother any longer, but the available and acceptable avenues of meaning are such that the child must either a) want to want to be like the one who seems to have the phallus, like the one who always seems “to have what it takes” (“masculine” identification with the actively possessive social position of the husband/father) or b) want to want to be like the one who seems to be the phallus for another, who always seems “to be there for the taking” (“feminine” identification with the passively possess-able social position of the “trophy” wife/mother). Regarding “plan b,” Lacan writes: “Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I am saying that it is in order to be the phallus—that is, the signifier of the Other’s desire—that a woman rejects an essential part of femininity, namely, all its attributes, in the masquerade” (1966f/2006: 583). He also writes that “The fact that femininity finds refuge in this mask . . . has the curious consequence of making virile display in human beings seem feminine” (1966f/2006: 584)—a clear enough object lesson for anyone who wants to follow “plan a.”12 In Lacan’s view, however, the anatomically male child isn’t

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“He is a penis”: So how does the simultaneous hypersexualization and emasculation of Black men mentioned in the last footnote relate to the seeming feminization of “virile display in human beings” as per Lacan? I’ll let Frantz Fanon tell you. Writing about antiblackness and “Negrophobia” in the chapter of Black Skin, White Masks called “The Negro and Psychopathology,” Fanon asks: “on the genital level, when a white man hates black men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence or of sexual inferiority? Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge? We know how much of sexuality there is in all cruelties, tortures, beatings” (122–3). Fanon then goes on to quote some ridiculously Negrophobic fantasies on the part of a “serious writer” named Michel Cournot, which I won’t reproduce here, then writes that “When one reads this passage a dozen times and lets oneself go—that is, when one abandons oneself to the movement of its images—one is no longer aware of the Negro but only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis” (130). So, again, how does this white hyper-phallification of “the Negro” amount to an emasculation, a feminization—and a reification? Well, as described above, Lacan says that in gender-normative terms, in terms of the “order[s] and norms [that] must be instituted which tell the subject what a man or a woman must do” (1966h//2006: 720), the man must be supposed to have and the woman must be supposed to be the phallus. In Fanon’s analysis, however, for the white man the feared and hated Black man becomes

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biologically destined to opt for “plan a” any more than the biologically female child is anatomically destined to go for “plan b.” There’s nothing (but fear) to stop a man from wanting “to be” (or) a woman (from) wanting “to have.” Lacan, that is, concurs with Freud’s great line from Civilization and its Discontents: “Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities for happiness for a portion of security” (1930/1989: 752). And given the way our civilization still tends to withhold its love, recognition, and protection from those who deviate from its identificatory rules, it is, for Lacan,“understandable” (albeit anything but “natural”) that most “boys” will desire to seem to securely have and most “girls” will desire to seem to securely be what he, Lacan, seems all too happy to call the phallus. Whether or not this happy calling makes Lacan a friend of phallogocentrism is a question that we can address by briefly considering the difference, in Lacan’s writing, between necessities and contingencies. Clearly, Lacan views the primordial separation from the real as a necessary and transhistorical condition for any human reality whatsoever, and he sees “the signifier” as the necessary and transhistorical mark of that separation or deprivation. Just as clearly, Lacan states that “we must accept castration,” allowing “castration” to designate the mark of “primal repression” that always necessarily calls or cuts us away from the real. Somewhat less clearly, however, Lacan will suggest that while this “being called away” from the real is structurally necessary for all of human reality, the “fact” of our having to keep calling that casting call “castration” is historically contingent and could conceivably even be dispensed with. Such, at any rate, is what I take Lacan to mean in Seminar XX when he writes that for his money “the apparent necessity of the phallic function turns out to be mere contingency” (1975/1998: 94). Not that it’s easy to understand what Lacan “really” means in any of his writings: of all the writing called theoretical, Lacan’s is perhaps the most difficult. But Lacan’s specific difficulty—so productive of his reader’s feelings

not simply another man with a penis, and really not a man at all, but rather “a penis symbol” in and of himself: the Black man is “turned into a penis. He is a penis.” And if he is a penis, he can’t very well have a penis. More significantly, he can’t have “the phallus,” which means that he really isn’t a man, much less the man. In the standard Oedipalized heteropatriarchal economy, the father seems to have the phallus because he seems to possess the mother who seems to be the phallus because she seems to be the father’s “possession.” In the colonial or slave economy, the white colonizers/enslavers (of whatever sex) seem to “have the phallus” and thus to collectively be the man by virtue of figuratively or literally “owning” all the (gender undifferentiated) Black people within their grasp. To reiterate Mari Ruti’s point about penis envy, “social advantages . . . automatically accrue to the possessor of the penis, particularly if he happens to be white” (2018a: ix), and if he doesn’t happen to be white, then such advantages do not “automatically accrue,” and may not accrue at all.

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of bafflement, malaise, and non-self-identity—could be what finally undermines the argument that Lacan not only diagnoses but endorses phallogocentrism or unambiguously wants to enforce the patriarchal law of the father. For if “phallogocentrism” can be taken as a fairly recent word for that “image of perfectly self-present meaning” which has long constituted “the underlying ideal of Western culture” (Johnson 1981: ix); if, as Donna Haraway puts it, the ideal of “perfect communication” and of “one code that translates all meaning perfectly” is in fact phallogocentrism’s “central dogma” (Haraway 1985/2008:176), then, however “cocksure” he may have been of himself as a man, or as an analyst, it would seem hard to justify tagging Lacan’s writing as phallogocentric, given the ostentatious imperfection and incompletion that pervades his every écrit. Perhaps the “fact” that we find nothing but resolute indetermanence at the center of Lacan’s purportedly “modern” or “structuralist” thought can metonymically displace it (and us) into some sort of anti-phallogocentric postmodernism—perhaps even into “a queer poststructuralism of the psyche” (Butler 2004: 44).13 Maybe the fact that Lacan’s “center [is one we] cannot hold” is what makes his theoretical writing neither dogmatically rigid nor relativistically limp but rather excessively rich—if not, at the end of the day, “the richest.”

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Eight: iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs, signifier/signified, syntagmatic/ paradigmatic, horizontal/vertical axes, synecdoche, metalanguage, condensation/displacement, symptom, cathexis, the phallus, logos, logocentrism, phallgocentrism, castration anxiety, penisnied, paternal metaphor, indetermanence

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The word indetermanence is used by Ihab Hassan “to designate two central tendencies in postmodernism, indeterminacy and immanence” (Woods 2009: 73). See Hassan (1987; Adventures: 215–26). As for Judith Butler’s phrase, I use it archly, since for Butler Lacanian psychoanalysis is the last place one should look for “a queer poststructuralism of the psyche.” My irony has at least one strong queer ally, however—namely, Tim Dean, who in Beyond Sexuality argues convincingly against Butler’s take on Lacan and persuasively for the thesis that “in its most fundamental formulations psychoanalysis is a queer theory” (2000: 268). We will be discussing poststructuralism and postmodernism in the next lesson and exploring queer theory in the last.

Lesson Nine

“There is nothing outside the text” —or, fear of the proliferation of meaning

I: Given to excess One of the larger canards in the received wisdom about poststructuralism and postmodernism is that their proponents don’t believe in “meaning,” don’t think it’s possible for anyone ever to “mean” anything at all. Both arenas of theoretical writing have been branded as “trendy nihilisms” that deny life, language, or literature any significance whatsoever. But this charge of “nihilism” rather badly misses its mark, for, as we’ll learn in this lesson, poststructuralist and postmodernist writers fall quite short of asserting that life, language, and literature have “no meaning.” Rather, such writers examine our fear that human reality generates far too many meanings, produces way too much interpretation: they trace and engage—but never quite assuage— our pervasive anxieties about semiotic excess. For, to return to a key figure who we’ve not mentioned in a while, these writers have read their Nietzsche, who thought that we should neither “wish to divest existence of its rich ambiguity” nor ever “reject the possibility” that the world “may include infinite interpretations” (1887/2006: 378, 379). PostNietzschean writers hope to preserve and enhance this exceedingly “rich ambiguity,” but they also attempt, as did Nietzsche at his diagnostic best, to bring out into the light our persistent “metaphysical” wish to “divest” ourselves of interpretive overabundance; they examine our “imperialist” tendency to reject multiple possibilities and to suppress alternative intelligibilities, our desire to control and contain difference and alterity in “others” and in ourselves. Far from espousing some lame “disbelief in meaning,” then, these writers interrogate all the “ideological figure[s] by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning” (Foucault 1969/1998: 222). Chief among those fear-based “figures” is arguably “meaning” itself, a word that has been used quite routinely in the “history of metaphysics” to police rowdy proliferation, an interpretive police-action allowing certain readers to imagine that post-Nietzschean infidels “don’t believe” in any 213

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“meaning” simply because they don’t buy any one “fixed” interpretation of what “meaning” means. But other looming figures of fixity include reason, order, origin, essence, presence, unity, universality, purpose, being, identity, totality, God, man, center, truth, concept, science, enlightenment, history, progress, modernity, author, structure, the unconscious, and so on. The general poststructuralist/postmodernist argument is that these figures—each of which at one time or another has been purported or relied upon to guarantee “meaning,” to enable and enrich (or at least secure and stabilize) our understanding—have also worked to impede and impoverish creative thought, to limit “the play of signification” (Derrida 1966/1978: 280), to constrict the “liberation of symbolic energy” (Barthes 1971/1977: 158), to curtail “the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction” (Foucault 1969/1998: 221), to mortify or petrify what Nietzsche himself might have simply called “art.”1 The more specifically postcolonial inflection of this argument is that these master tropes of Western metaphysics have enriched and empowered themselves at the considerable expense of others—not other tropes, but also, and brutally, other people: all those who have been “othered” (colonized, subordinated, abjected, marginalized, exoticized, silenced, exploited, enslaved, exterminated) by the dominant “first-world” orders of knowledge, power, and truth. Thus Homi Bhabha begins his essay “The Other Question” by asserting that “an important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the ideological construction of otherness” (1983/1996: 37). Now, we can’t adequately demonstrate here how each and every one of the figures listed above has participated in “the violence of metaphysics” or operated in the service of ideology and empire. But we can note, for example,

1

Because Derrida can be playful when writing about play, the play of his writing is frequently misinterpreted. Niall Lucy writes that “When Derrida writes about ‘play’, he doesn’t mean ‘freeplay’ or wanton ‘playfulness’. He doesn’t mean, ‘playing around with— for the heck of it’.” Rather, writes Lucy, Derrida “makes it clear that ‘play’ means something like ‘give’ or ‘tolerance’ . . . which works against ideas of self-sufficiency or absolute completion” (2004: 95). But Lucy also contends that some “US literary critics” offer wrong-headed readings of Derrida “based on a misinterpretation of Derrida’s ‘play’ as ‘freeplay’ or a kind of quasi-Nietzschean ‘creativity’ ” (2004: 94–5). Now, by associating Derrida’s “play” with Nietzsche’s “art,” as I have above, I would seem to be guilty of just such a misreading as Lucy describes; I insist upon this overly “free association” anyway, mainly because, despite Lucy’s correction, I remain persuaded that Derrida’s “play” would not have been possible, or givable, or tolerable, without Nietzsche’s “quasi-Nietzschean creativity,” or at least without what Derrida himself calls “Nietzschean affirmation . . . the joyous affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (1966/1978: 292).

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how the appearance on our list of the words “essence,” “God,” and “man” underscores the anti-essentialist, anti-theological, and anti-humanist dispositions of theoretical writing that we first encountered in our introductory chapter. The fact that the word “truth” gets listed here would seem to indicate that post-Nietzschean theory is also anti-veridical, “against truth.” And that’s actually kind of a true story, for these interpretive strategies do in fact follow Nietzsche in holding that there are no facts, only interpretations, and in experimentally calling into question the actual value of what gets called “truth.” The distinction between “truth” and “what gets called truth” is crucial here, and those writing in Nietzsche’s wake argue that there’s actually none of the former outside of the latter—not that there are no truths at all, but rather that there are no free-standing truths outside of particular truth-claims, which are always rendered in language, always put into words. In other words, and again, “theory begins . . . at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic . . . and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression” (Jameson 2004: 403). Or, in still other words, “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida 1967/1997: 158). Now, an indispensable guide to understanding the paradox of “antiveridical truth-claims” would be Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” which we began to explore in the Preface, which argues that truths are artistic illusions which we have forgotten are artistic illusions, and which should help us understand the “anti-veridical” bent of post-Nietzschean theoretical writing, to grasp why Nietzsche himself interprets “truth” as the implacable enemy of “art.” For again, in all truth, what we call “truth” exists only in the form of statements, expressions, or truth-claims, which must be made in language, which is by nature fictional. “Truths” in Nietzsche’s view are those initially experimental fictions that have become so sedimented or fixed for “a people” as to seem metallically real, canonical, foundational. For Nietzsche, what “we the people” actually value in what we call “truth” is less veracity than fixity, the binding and comforting sense of security against fiction, against the wild proliferation of fiction, that “knowing the truth” would seem to provide. If (as Nietzsche’s story goes) the “eternal verities” could ever be honest about themselves, if “an honest truth” weren’t a contradiction in terms, then “truth” would just have to fess up to being fiction, simply another form of art, and certain pro-veridical disciplines—religion, philosophy, history, science—would have to acknowledge their own imaginative, rhetorical, performative, or “literary” statuses as well. Art can remain luxuriantly artistic while still being completely honest in and about its utter mendacity. But neither “truth” nor its attendant discourses can afford to be truthful about themselves without becoming truly other than themselves,

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strangers to themselves. And so, rather like the violent homophobe who attacks in the openly queer human being what he can’t admit or abide in himself, the ugly “truth” must maintain itself in its rancorous hostility to art, its “constitutive other” or beautiful semblable—hence the phrase “the violence of metaphysics.” But just as “truth” operates aggressively against the “symbolic energy” animating the “free circulation” of art, so do concepts function repressively against the “freeplay” of differences, against Derridean différance.2 But the key to understanding what Derrida means by “différance,” or, at least, a key to understanding why he insists that “différance” isn’t a concept, is found once again in “On Truth and Lies,” where Nietzsche asks that we critically “consider the formation of concepts.” Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept “leaf ” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This [forgetting] awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf ”: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. (1873/2006: 117; Adventures: 36–7)

Here Nietzsche takes aim at “conceptual” targets both political (the egalitarian democratic movements of his day, which he thought were forcing “the equation of unequal things”) and philosophical (the arch-idealist Plato, who believed that behind all multifariously existent material realities, like “leaves,”

2

“Perhaps unhelpfully,” write Malpas and Wake, “Derrida claims . . . that différance is ‘literally neither a word nor a concept’ and that it ‘has neither existence nor essence’. What is clear, however, is that différance derives from the Latin verb differre and the French différer, which in English have given rise to two distinct verbs: to defer and to differ. Différance incorporates both of these meanings and thus serves to emphasize two key Derridean concerns: with absence rather than presence (full meaning is never present, but is instead constantly deferred because of the différance characteristic of language); and with difference rather than identity . . . In describing différance as the ‘systematic play of differences’ which is built into language . . . Derrida carries Saussure’s theory of language as a system of differences to its most extreme conclusion” (2006: 173). Niall Lucy adds that “the ongoing movement of différance disturbs the idea of difference meaning ‘a fixed difference’ . . . [T]he disturbance caused by différance [puts] the entire history of metaphysics . . . at risk . . . because différance . . . dislodges the security or selfsufficiency of concepts like truth, presence and identity” (2004: 26).

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there stands a unitary and original form or truly ideal model for those realities—e.g., the “leaf ”; that all material things are just so many sorry copies of the original model; and that mimetic representations of material things are merely copies of copies, many false steps removed from the “truth”).3 By playing so anti-Platonically in these leaves, however, Nietzsche partially births deconstruction, “reversing and displacing” a foundational binary opposition of Western metaphysics: good original vs. bad copy.4 While in garden-variety Platonism “leaf ” would be held up as the first and original “cause” over and against those secondary effects called “leaves,” Nietzsche here suggests that the putative copies, the leaves—or better, the differences among them—actually “come first,” and that the concept “leaf ” is formed only by virtue of specific operations of repression (arbitrarily discarding individual differences) and amnesia (forgetting distinguishing aspects). It is only after these operations are performed that their conceptual effect—“leaf ”—is implanted in our idealist imaginary as the original cause of the infinitely multifarious leaves. In our ordinary “metaphysical” thinking, the singularly “good” origin must always causally precede the multitudinously “bad” copies. In Nietzsche’s “proto-deconstructionist” analysis, however, the copies precede and give birth to the origin, which turns out to be a hoary sham—more twilit idol than guiding light.

3 4

See Kalliopi Nikolopoulou’s entry on “Platonism” in the BHLCT (623–4). Niall Lucy writes that while deconstruction “is impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction’s part than with the impossibility of every ‘is’ as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every ‘is’, or simply from a refusal of authority in general . . . Or, as Derrida puts it in one of many approximations of a definition of deconstruction, to say that deconstruction consists of anything would be to say it consists of ‘deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting “out of joint” the authority of the “is’ ” [Derrida 1995: 25]” (2006: 11–12). To “deconstruct” is thus “to open or unsettle the seeming imperviousness of a concept of essence or identity in general, concerning fixed ideas of politics, being, truth, and so on” (Lucy 2004: 12). As for the binary oppositions that deconstruction tends to have its way with, note how each of the privileged “master tropes” on our metaphysical list tends to stand over and against its “other” in a hierarchical relationship of dominance: reason/madness, order/chaos, purpose/chance, presence/ absence, identity/difference, being/nothingness, god/devil, man/woman, center/margin, truth/error, etc. Derrida argues that Western metaphysics has always depended on maintaining these and other hierarchical binaries. He is principally concerned with the binary pair speech/writing, with the way Western metaphysics since Plato has privileged the spoken word, which seems to guarantee the speaker’s living presence both to himself and his auditors, over the written trace, which seems to imply absence, spacing, difference, and death. For Derrida, however, speech is always already infected by every bad thing that writing seems to represent (including the “graphic violence” of the representational itself). Derrida reads the metaphysical privileging of speech as a secondary effect derived from dysgraphia, the basic fear of writing.

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Before leaving Nietzsche’s leaves, however, let’s take a brief look at how he treats another prominent figure on the metaphysical list: “reason.” Nietzsche begins his critique of philosophical rationalism with his first writing, Birth of Tragedy, which diagnoses Greek drama’s decline from the “divine” representation of Apollonian and Dionysian “dreams and ecstasies” to the more “stage-manageable” realm of Socratic and Euripidean “ideas and feelings,” a more reasonable kingdom in which “art is overgrown by philosophical thought and forced to cling closely to the trunk of dialectic” (1872/2006: 68).5 But if Nietzsche begins his critique of rationalism with Birth of Tragedy, he brings it to a head in Genealogy of Morals, where we find perhaps his pithiest aphorism: “reasons relieve” (1887/1992: 576). To begin to understand Nietzsche’s reasons for making this claim, consider that in Nietzsche’s analysis we have long channeled our overabundant “symbolic energy” into a series of tense negotiations with the problem of suffering. As you’ll recall from the discussion in Lesson Four, Nietzsche really couldn’t argue with the Buddha’s first noble truth: life is painful. In Nietzsche’s view, we the living can endure quite a lot of pain for quite a long time, even to no end; but what we apparently cannot endure, not even for a New York minute, is pain to no purpose, suffering for no good reason. Thus a large part of our imaginative activities involves creative rationalization, inventing all the very good reasons we can come up with, but necessarily forgetting our own acts of invention, pragmatically using these fabricated reasons to explain our suffering to ourselves, blessedly relieving ourselves of the evil of unexplainable sorrow while identifying “the reasonable” and “the relieving” both with each other and with “the good” in and of itself.

5

I emphasize the phrase reasonable kingdom here to pave the way for the following “regicidal” passage from Derrida: “Différance is . . . not a present being, however excellent, unique, principal, or transcendent. It governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and nowhere exercises any authority . . . Not only is there no kingdom of différance, but différance instigates the subversion of every kingdom. Which makes it obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom, the past or future presence of a kingdom” (1967/1982: 21–2; Adventures: 124). The “nostalgic” part of us that “desires a kingdom” is, arguably, the part that dreads différance, that fears the proliferation of meaning, and so wants above all else the stability of fixed signification, a.k.a. “truth.” The “other” part of us is drawn toward what Derrida calls the “Nietzschean affirmation” of “active interpretation” (1966/1978: 292). Derrida writes that this “active interpretation . . . substitutes incessant deciphering for the unveiling of truth as a presentation of the thing itself in its presence, etc.” What results from this incessant deciphering are “figures without truth, or at least a system of figures that is not dominated by the value of truth . . . Thus, différance is the name we might give to the ‘active,’ moving discord of different forces, and of differences between forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever that system governs culture, philosophy, and science” (1967/1982: 18; Adventures: 120).

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A rudimentary example: one aspect of reality that we tend to find insufferable is unfightable injustice—“life isn’t fair,” horrible things happen to wonderful but powerless people, monstrous creeps get away with heinous crimes, perpetrators of atrocities go free, and so on. Over time, we’ve devised our own systems of justice to try to deal with this problem, punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent whenever humanly possible. But because we know that the systems that we know that we created don’t work perfectly—and can’t in any case medicate the pain we experience when the innocent are slain by “acts of nature”—we must also fantasize perfect (if mysterious) systems of justice (God’s will, eternal compensations or penalties in the afterlife, the ironclad laws of karma, etc.), “supernatural” systems that we can’t know or acknowledge that we ourselves imagined, simply because if we did know, they wouldn’t work, wouldn’t provide “relief.” Nietzsche here joins Marx in thinking of religion as the oldest and most popular opiate in world history. Unlike actual drugs, however, which “work their magic” regardless of whatever their users might “believe” about them (crystal meth will have its way with me even if I discover that it wasn’t cooked up by elves), imaginary opiates typically fail to opiate humans who “come to believe” that merely human imaginations produced them: “reasons” cease to “relieve” the non-duped who figure out the real reasons behind them. Hence “God is dead” for the utterly disenchanted, modern, secular, rationalist imagination, which has supposedly left religious fear and superstition behind in the dust of its progress. But Nietzsche’s whole argument “against reason” is that “reason” can operate just as narcotically as does religion, dialectically “relieving” its adherents of their sufferings, their pained experience of contradiction, assuaging them of their anxiety that even clearly scientific “truth” might relapse into the murkier realms of myth and art. For Nietzsche, the “fundamental secret of science” is that it constitutively misunderstands its own teleological goal: the scientific “search for truth” has always been accompanied by a profound delusion, which first came into the world in the person of Socrates—the unshakeable belief that, by following the guiding thread of causality, thought reaches into the deepest abysses of being and is capable not only of knowing but even of correcting being. This sublime metaphysical madness accompanies science as an instinct and leads it again and again to its limits, where it must transform itself into art: which is the real goal of this mechanism. (1872/2006: 71)

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For Nietzsche, then, the “reason” worshiped by both modern and classical metaphysics is at root animated by anxiety, by our fear of “the dangerous and cancerous proliferation of significations” (Foucault 1969/1998: 222), our fear that metaphysical truth might metastasize into mad fiction. Like religion, “reason” operates analgesically, spreading the salve of coherence on the painful wound of contradiction. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered. (Derrida 1966/1978: 27)

If, as Nietzsche teaches, “concepts” are the “graveyard of [differential] perceptions” (1873/2006: 121; Adventures: 41), if “concepts” per se express “the force of a desire” to repress or forget the play of différance, then, as Derrida, to whose text we’ve abruptly cut here, might say, “the concept of centered structure” has long expressed the coercively orthopedic heart of that desire. In Derrida’s heartbreaking estimation, such forceful expression/ repression is the center’s structural function, or the structure’s central function, and has been for quite some time, for the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix . . . is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. (1966/1978: 279).

Now, the “rupture” of which Derrida speaks in this passage would seem to involve the advent of structuralism, “the linguistic turn in the human sciences.” Before this turn, before this rupture, “the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself ” (1966/1978: 279). After the turn, after Nietzsche’s insight into the way the “web of concepts is torn by art” (1873/2006: 121; Adventures: 42), after Saussure’s insight that language is a differential structure without positive terms, the unthinkable materializes itself, tears us a new one. In other words, the unthinkable rupture occurs when it finally dawns upon certain thinkers that human reality is only ever

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put into writing and that writing neither contains nor emanates from a center. “Henceforth,” writes Derrida, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse . . . that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely. (1966/1978: 280).

If it was structuralism that first alerted thinkers to this invasion, Derrida thinks that “modern” structuralism, still indentured to an ancient metaphysical dream of truth, misread its own differential significance. In “The Structural Study of Myth,” for example, Claude Levi-Strauss asserts that “whatever emendations the original formulation may now call for, everybody will agree that the Saussurean principle of the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign was a prerequisite for the accession of linguistics to the scientific level” (1963/2007: 860). On the contrary, poststructuralists agree that Saussure’s principles necessitated the demotion of almighty science to the merely linguistic level, the displacement of all scientific truth into figurative language. As Zakiyyah Imam Jackson puts it, “scientific representations are still representations” (2018: 623). And this figural/representational displacement carries with it not only “truth” but any “pro-veridical” discourse aspiring to operate on “the scientific level” or purporting to make “rigorous statements” about any “central” objects of analysis. These “centers” of science include, obviously, “structure” for structuralism, but also “history” for Marxist dialectics and “the unconscious” for psychoanalysis. In the essay “Freud and Lacan,” for example, Althusser avers that Lacan’s first word is to say: in principle, Freud founded a science. A new science which was the science of a new object: the unconscious. A rigorous statement. If psycho-analysis is a science because it is the science of a distinct object it is also a science with the structure of all sciences. (1971/2001:135).

For Derrida, however, this “rigorous” presumption of a distinct object as the prerequisite for any science represents the big problem with big science,

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betraying the metaphysical hangover afflicting the structure of all sciences as well as the “science-ism” of all existing structuralisms. In Derrida’s critique of psychoanalysis, then, Lacan remains a facteur de la vérité, a scientific “purveyor of truth” (Derrida 1980/1987: 413) in cahoots with every other ascetic idealist in the history of Western metaphysics. Coupling, as you’ll recall, Saussure with Freud to argue that “the unconscious structured like a language” always involves a central lack, Lacan “deprivingly” dictates that “we must accept castration” because “castration” is the bedrock “truth” of desire and the veritable “centre of analytic experience” (Lacan 2008: 41, 53). Writing against the castrating Lacan, Derrida reads Saussure back through Nietzsche to argue that language “more radically” involves not a central lack but a lack of center. Derrida thus more generously advocates a “joyous affirmation” that “determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center” (1966/1978: 292)—a “playful” affirmation that determines the noncenter otherwise than in the Oedipal terms of castration and without any guilt over “broken immediacy” (1966/1978: 292) with mother/nature or any nostalgia for some lost ontological homeland of the real. This “joyous affirmation,” writes Derrida, “plays without security.” This “active interpretation” of interpretation affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, through the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. (1966/1978: 292)

One could of course argue with Derrida about the “central significance” of Lacan’s writings. As I suggested at the end of the previous lesson, it’s possible to affirm Lacan otherwise than as an apostle of phallogocentric heteropatriarchy. But as should be clear to anyone who might actually bother to read Derrida’s most basic writings, his poststructuralist affirmation of “the noncenter” hardly amounts to a nihilistic chucking of all “significance” tout court. Rather, Derrida’s Nietzschean “affirmation of life” traces what he calls an “overabundance of the signifier” (1966/1978: 290).6 This vital excess can only cause trouble in “a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their significations” (Foucault 1969/1998: 221); excessive différance is thus “obviously threatening

6

“Deconstruction,” writes Derrida, “is on the side of the yes, of the affirmation of life” (cited in Benjamin 2006: 81).

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and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires [such a world, such] a kingdom” (Derrida 1967/1982: 21–2; Adventures: 124). This overabundance of differential signification prods “anxious” interpreters to circle the wagons around the “fundamental immobility” and “reassuring certitude” of a “center” that can “hold.” But this overabundance can also spur active interpreters to initiate new methods of paying “tenacious attention to the materiality of human signification” (Chow 2002/2007: 1910), to produce “new concepts to explain how meaning works” (Lucy 2004: 144), novel ways of reading and writing not only novels but all the arts of being human after the linguistic turn and in the absence of any “transcendental signified.”7 Derrida, for his part, attempts to “affirm play” beyond “man and humanism,” after the closure of metaphysics. But he hardly imagines that, by virtue of this attempt, he or we can ever simply wash our hands of metaphysics, for any claim “against truth” is still inescapably a truth-claim, and any attempt to rinse oneself clean of the remains of the metaphysical remains, in itself, a metaphysical gesture. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon— which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit propositions of precisely what it had to contest. (Derrida 1966/1978: 280–1)

To “affirm play” thus doesn’t mean to imagine that one has completely shaken off the last drops of metaphysics. Rather, for Derrida, to “affirm play” means to let go of the idea that there’s ever going to be any really “reassuring foundation” for the signification of human reality, any natural or supernatural locus regulating the proliferation of meaning, any philosophical, political, theological, or poetical “center” that isn’t implicated in the all-too-human dream of full presence, the magical “image of perfectly self-present meaning”

7

Rather than seeming to support an unproductive “us” vs. “them” interpretation of interpretation, I hope to have suggested here that the “anxious” and the “active” modes of interpretation can operate simultaneously within the same subject’s “interpretive experience.” In so suggesting, I am echoing not only points made in note 4 above but also Nietzsche’s argument in Beyond Good and Evil that “master moralities and slave moralities” aren’t necessary parceled out to “masters” and “slaves” respectively but can be internally juxtaposed in one individual subject’s psyche—“even in the same person, within one single breast” (1886/2006: 356).

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that is “the underlying ideal of Western culture” (Johnson 1981: ix; Adventures 100).8 Once play is affirmed, however, Derrida does indeed attempt to extend its domain ad infinitum, releasing a swarm of new terms and phrases—différance only one among so many others, like trace and supplement, that Derrida warrants his own personal dictionary (Lucy 2004)—all in the effort to examine “how meaning works” without foundationally fixing it or transporting it into some transcendental ether.9 These Derridean “figures without truth” (1967/1982: 18) cannot be absolutely foreign to metaphysics, but they can defamiliarize its history: they can never “truly” shake metaphysics off, but they can make its foundational assumptions tremble. Derrida’s most infamously tremulous bit of “averidicality” is no doubt the axiom that forms the title of this lesson: il n’y a pas de hors-texte: there is no outside-text, or “there is nothing outside the text” (1967/1997: 158). This little zinger appears in the section of Of Grammatology called “The Exorbitant. Question of Method,” which concerns both Rousseau’s writings and Rousseau’s representative and dysgraphic anxieties about the exorbitances of writing in general. For Derrida, however, the methodical question is one “not only of Rousseau’s writing but also of our reading.” Any writer, writes Derrida,

8

9

Speaking of poetical “centers,” one might say that the line from Yeats’s “The Second Coming” to which I’ve been alluding—“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold” ” (1920/1983: 187)—rests on the assumption that the very coherence of things depends upon the center’s absolutely holding. Yeats assumes that for most of his readers it will just make sense—it will be sense itself, as Derrida might say—that if the center cannot hold, things will fall apart. In affirming the noncenter and the absence of the transcendental signified, however, Derrida is no slouching beast; he is not trying to make things fall apart or let all the falcons fly away, not loosing mere anarchy upon the world or drowning the ceremony of innocence in a blood-dimmed tide. Rather, carrying “Saussure’s theory of language as a system of differences to its most extreme conclusion” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 173), Derrida simply proposes an extremely different model of coherence, a radically different way for things to hold together, than that presupposed by “the underlying ideal of Western culture” and by the centered structure of Yeats’s poem. Unlike the Saussurean “sign”—which presupposes a “unity” of signifier and signified and the maintenance of an “active-passive” binary relation between those two components— Derrida’s trace “functions to unsettle the sign’s metaphysical determination” (Lucy 2004: 144). “Although referred to in the affirmative, the trace is actually a lack, the presence of an absence or the absence of presence, the antithesis of the sign” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 261). The supplement is not unrelated: “In ordinary language, a supplement is something added to an already complete whole. The possibility of something being added, however, reveals a lack in the original it is meant to complete . . . Derrida extends the contradictory logic of the word ‘supplement’ in order to interrogate the conventional Western idea that speech, as the original form of language, is merely represented by writing. Derrida argues that the structure of writing is not secondary to, but inextricable from, that of speech itself. This challenges the supposed ‘originality’ of speech in relation to writing” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 258).

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writes in a language and in a logic whose proper system, laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And [our] reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses. This relationship is not a certain quantitative distribution of shadow and light, of weakness or of force, but a signifying structure that critical reading should produce. (1967/1997: 158)

Derrida attempts to “produce” a method of “reading” (sometimes called deconstruction) which assumes that writers, even great writers, are never the absolutely dominative commanders of language; deconstructive reading tenaciously attends to the differences between command and noncommand that appear in the patterns of language in which all writers, even great writers, participate. As we’ll soon see, this Derridean production is not unrelated to Roland Barthes’ autopsy of “the Author” and Michel Foucault’s interrogation of that august figure, all of which (production, autopsy, and interrogation) were published within the same few tremulously anti-authoritarian years (1967, 1968, and 1969, respectively). But before attending those slightly later funerals for authorial authority, let’s consider one of Derrida’s explanatory comments about il n’y a pas de hors-texte: The concept of text I propose is limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere. What I call “text” implies all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio-institutional, in short; all possible referents. Another way of recalling, once again, that “there is nothing outside the text.” That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe or have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality, has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this real except in an interpretive experience. The latter neither yields meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of differential referring. That’s all. (1988: 148).

Despite, however, this and other fairly lucid explanations of his take on “the text,” Derrida is still construed by all-too-conventional wisdom to be an “abstruse” nihilist who thought that “all referents are suspended” and that no “interpretive experience” can ever “yield meaning” of any kind or of any value to any reader. Derrida is still understood to have “claimed that language, by its

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very nature, undermined any meaning it attempted to promote” (Eugenides 2011: 47). But Derrida actually rejects the inherited metaphysical logic that if there’s no “center” for everything there can never be any “point” or “meaning” to anything, that if “the center cannot hold” then all our significations must “fall apart.” There’s quite a significant difference, after all, between claiming that all “meaning” is always “undermined”—whatever that means—and promoting the view that no “meaning” ever escapes or transcends its constitutive involvement in “a movement of differential referring.” There’s a large and loudly honking difference between writing “There is no simple reference” (1972/1981a: 206), as Derrida did, and asserting that “there is simply no reference,” as Derrida damn well didn’t. It was always Derrida’s dilemma that certain people read (him) very selectively, if at all, and that certain readers have trouble envisioning any protocols of reading other than those that protect their own certainties. Reasons relieve, and so, often enough, does reading. In Of Grammatology, Derrida writes that a productive (rather than protective) way of reading cannot consist of reproducing, by the effaced and respectful doubling of commentary, the conscious, voluntary, intentional relationship that the writer institutes in his exchanges with the history to which he belongs thanks to the element of language. This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. To recognize and respect all its classical exigencies is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism. Without this recognition and this respect, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading. (1967/1997: 158)

This passage, had it been carefully read, or read at all, might have quieted certain academic and journalistic rumors that Derridean “freeplay” = “anything goes,” that deconstruction completely evacuates (itself on) “traditional criticism” while “playfully” authorizing itself to say almost anything, or that Derrida considers all “critical productions” equally valid or equally invalid and all “interpretive experience” simply a “meaningless” (albeit “playful”) game. Coincidentally, the passage just quoted happens to appear on the very same page of Derrida’s text as il n’y a pas de hors-texte, the phrase that launched a thousand claims that Derrida believed all of reality to be “enclosed in a book.” Of course, one would have to have actually opened and read a book by Derrida to understand how many of the slings and arrows of academic outrage against deconstruction were quite beside his points. But then again,

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one would have to have read some Nietzsche to understand how and why valid points against validity, or truth-claims against truth, or reasonable arguments against reason, might be possible or desirable in the first place; one would need to have read a few key Nietzschean affirmations to understand how deconstruction can be “on the side of the yes, of the affirmation of life” (Derrida, cited in Benjamin 2006: 81), how “interpretive experience” can say “yes” to “life” by affirming no end of “figures without truth” (Derrida 1967/1982: 18; Adventures: 120); one would have to have read Nietzsche, as Derrida read Nietzsche, to understand how reading and writing can affirm “life” by experimentally calling the “value of truth” into question.10 As for Barthes and Foucault, their respective titles—“The Death of the Author” and “What is an Author?”—seemed to distress the late-twentiethcentury literary cognoscenti even more than Nietzsche’s “God is dead” outraged his readers at the previous fin de siècle. And here’s a possible explanation for this difference in levels of distress: Most contemporary intellectuals worthy of the name are comfortably atheist or agnostic and either don’t very much mind God’s being dead or never entertained the notion of one day becoming deities themselves. But many writers (the writer of this very sentence not, in all honesty, exempted) still hold on to the dream of ending up as respected authors or authorities in the dominative and commanding sense that Derrida, Barthes, and Foucault describe and deride. Aspiring masters of meaning may no longer believe in God, but “they still believe in truth,” as Nietzsche puts it; they still on some level want (every reader) to bow down before the powerful figure of “the author” as both producer and proprietor of “truth”; they still depend upon the idea of “the author” to grant them serenity, “repose, security, and consistency” (Nietzsche 1873/2006: 119; Adventures: 39) Barthes’ gambit “to substitute language itself for the person who until [recently] had been supposed to be its owner” and his assertion that “it is language which speaks, not the author” (1968/1977: 143) both spell a kind of “death” for this patriarchal “Author-God” as proprietary commando, “the father and the owner of his work” (1971/1977: 160). But Barthes doesn’t thereby represent actual writers as mere ventriloquist’s dummies. The “Author-God” action-figure is arguably dead enough, but for Barthes this demise hardly means the end of writing. For writing “can be read without the

10

But, as we noted in our first encounter with Nietzsche back in the “You can’t handle the truth!” section of the Preface, one might end up affirming something more and other than “life” by proceeding with the same experiment—hence, again, Timothy Snyder’s warning: “Post-truth is pre-fascism” (2021).

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guarantee of its father” (1971/1977: 160); moreover, for Barthes, the writer’s actual power isn’t paternally procreative anyway. The writer’s actual power is not to originate but to mix. The text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture . . . The writer can [thus] only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others . . . Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely. (1968/1977: 146)

In Barthes’ estimation, the actual purpose of this figure called “the Author” is to please and empower the critic, not the active writer or the performative reader. For to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author [. . .] beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘explained’—victory to the critic. Hence there is no surprise in the fact that, historically, the reign of the Author has also been that of the Critic, nor again in the fact that criticism (be it new) is today undermined along with the Author. (1968/1977: 147)

In the place of “literature,” that once-sacred but now fatally compromised cow long milked by Author-God and Victor-Critic alike, Barthes proposes “writing,” which by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law. (1968/1977: 147)

Barthes goes on to suggest that the “true place” of such “writing” is “reading,” that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”—namely, the reader, who “is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the

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traces by which the written text is constituted.” Giving a big leg-up to reception theory and reader-response criticism, Barthes concludes: “Classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader; for it, the writer is the only person in literature . . . We [however] know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth; the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (1968/1977: 148).11 Writing a year later than Barthes, Foucault finds nothing fresh in the news about “the disappearance—or death—of the author,” which he says “criticism and philosophy took note of . . . some time ago.” He suggests, however, that its “consequences . . . have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its import been accurately measured” (1969/1998: 207). As Foucault puts it, in a barb against Barthes and a dig at Derrida, “it is not enough . . . to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared . . . [or] to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death” (1969/1998: 209), nor is it enough to use “the notion of writing” to “transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity” (1969/1998: 208). Instead, writes Foucault, “we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers” (1969/1998: 209). One important historical detail that Foucault uncovers is that “the author” hasn’t always represented everything it seems to stand for today, that the “author function” has functioned differently at various moments in the history of “our civilization.” “The author function,” writes Foucault, “does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way.” In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts that have required attribution to an author. There was a time when the types of texts we today call “literary” . . . were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author . . . On the other hand, those texts we now would call scientific . . . were accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as “true,” only when marked

11

Elsewhere Barthes writes that overthrowing the myth of the Author “requires that one try to abolish . . . the distance between writing and reading . . . by joining them in a single signifying practice.” He compares this joining to a moment in “the history of music”— before the age of mechanical reproduction and hence of music’s passive consumption —“when ‘playing’ and ‘listening’ formed a scarcely differentiated activity” because “practicing amateurs” (1971/1977: 162) had to be able to read and play the music on an instrument to be able to listen to it. As for reception theory and reader-response criticism, these are “concerned with both the aesthetic and the historical aspects of reading, i.e., the ways in which readers use texts for pleasure, and how readings alter and shift through history” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 245).

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with the name of their author. “Hippocrates said,” Pliny recounts” . . . (1969/1998: 212)

Today, of course, the situation is reversed: while we can’t tolerate the idea of a great literary work without some illustrious personage designated as its author, we routinely “impersonalize” scientific discourses in the very gesture of granting their authority (“evolutionary biology says,” “according to quantum physics,” etc.) without giving that grant a second thought. Foucault’s most characteristic arguments here, however, involve the ideology of the “author function,” the relationship between, on the one hand, the circulation of discourses that are thought to have “authors” and, on the other, the coercively panoptical operations of knowledge and power. When, for example, we read at the beginning of Foucault’s treatise that “the coming into being of the notion of the ‘author’ constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences” (1969/1998: 205) we should recall that while for some of us “individualization” might sound like a sweet deal, for Foucault it’s essentially a disciplinary process, a sour means of reproducing power relations. As he admonishes elsewhere: “Do not demand of politics that it restore the ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy has defined them,” for “the individual is the product of power” (Foucault 1972/1983: xiv). “Individualization” for Foucault is related to (albeit not completely identical with) ideological “interpellation” á la Althusser, which, as you’ll remember, involves turning “individuals” into docile bodies who “work all by themselves,” as if they were centers of rights and initiatives, as if they were free.12 If, historically, “discourses” have become unfree, have become “objects of appropriation” or ownership, then their

12

While there’s no room here for a full explication of the tension between Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics, power, knowledge, etc., and Althusser’s theory of ideology (which we explored in Lesson Five), suffice it to say that Foucault associates Althusser with just the sort of “Freudian-structuralist-Marxism” from which he wants to free himself: “I have,” he proclaims, “never been a Freudian, I have never been a Marxist, and I have never been a structuralist” (1983/1998: 437). I find it interesting, however, that some descriptions of Foucault’s insights into biopolitical subjectification/normalization can’t quite free themselves from Althusser’s take on interpellation. At the end of his chapter on “Biopower and Biopolitics” in the BHLCT, for example, Greg Lambert writes that for Foucault “normative biopolitics is simply the other side of juridical and political structures of representation and is the condition of its functioning and effectiveness. If the disciplinary technique of subjection functions all the more effectively as a general form of subjectification, ‘by which concrete individuals are thereby transformed into subjects,’ to quote an earlier line from Althusser, it is because the generalized strategy of biopolitics becomes typical, ordinary, common, that is, as the ‘complex idea’ of power that everyone in the social field both possesses and is possessed by” (2019:197).

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“authors,” the “individuals” who can be held responsible for them—who “own” them or can be made to “own up” to them—aren’t exactly free either but are always already “subjects” of discipline and control. In other words, “authors” are brought into being so that discourses might be better brought into custody; or, discourses are attributed to “authors” so that the latter can more effectively be located, incarcerated, silenced, and/or killed. Texts, books, and discourse really began to have authors . . . to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act—an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership. (1969/1998: 212)

Relating Foucault’s observation to relatively recent cultural clashes, we might ask against whom the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran could have issued his famous fatwa if The Satanic Verses (1988) had been attributed only to “the anonymity of a murmur” (Foucault 1969/1998: 222) and not to the transgressively blasphemous Salman Rushdie. Foucault famously begins and ends the essay called “What is an Author?” with a question attributed to Samuel Beckett: “ ‘What does it matter who is speaking’ ”? (1969/1998: 205). Someone like Foucault might reply not simply that it never matters who’s speaking, that we should never take the question seriously at all, but rather that it is only the Ayatollahs of coercive culture— and any culture is always to some degree coercive—who are duty-bound to take the question of “who is speaking” deadly seriously. For if we “keepers of the culture” can’t ascertain which particular “who” is in fact speaking, how can we know exactly which individual we should want to punish or silence or kill?13 Foucault himself wasn’t actually into killing off “the author.” Nor was he interested in torturing and interrogating that figure, forcing it to reveal its inner “authenticity” or express its “deepest self ” (1969/1998: 222). But Foucault did want to “change the subject,” to “reexamine the privileges of the subject” and call into question “the absolute character and founding role of the subject.” Foucault didn’t want to water-board “the author,” but he

13

Some commentary on contemporary conservative caterwauling about so-called “cancel culture” would seem to be called for here, but I’m sorry—I just can’t.

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advocated “depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator” and favored “analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse” (1969/1998: 220–21). Because “the author” has long (but not always) functioned as one of the most highly privileged “substitutes” for “the subject” qua originator in “our civilization,” Foucault thinks that it’s high time to address “the ‘ideological’ status of the author” and “reverse the traditional idea” of the author function. We are accustomed . . . to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages, that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion . . . The author is . . . the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. (1969/1998: 221–2)

As this passage should make crystal clear, Foucault didn’t scoff at “meaning” or fear its proliferation. He obviously didn’t completely discount “the truth,” either, since he doesn’t seem to mind telling us what it is.14 And if it is “the truth” that we have turned “the author” into an overly privileged “principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning,” Foucault truly feels that we no longer have to be quite so “thrifty” with our “discourses and their significations” (1969/1998: 221), that “our civilization” can now afford to dethrone “author” and “subject” as original, eternal, transcendent, inexhaustible sources of signification, that it really wouldn’t kill us to begin

14

Though Foucault necessarily speaks of “the truth” in a phrase like “the truth is quite the contrary,” his thinking about truth remains Nietzschean, which is to say that his thinking remains quite contrary to the idea that the truth exists, that there can ever be one truth for good and for all. For as he insists in “An Aesthetics of Existence,” “I believe too much in truth not to suppose that there are different truths and different ways of speaking the truth” (1984/1988: 51).

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thinking of these figures, and of ourselves, as variable and complex functions of discourse. Foucault’s proposals are thus pretty much compatible with Derrida’s and Barthes’ writings about “a writing that can know no halt” (Barthes 1968/1977: 147). But maybe it’s that very compatibility that makes all their writings about all that writing threatening to and dreaded by all our inner Ayatollahs, by everything within us that fears semiotic excess and wants to fix meaning, to bring writing to a halt, everything within us that desires either to be “the author” or to bow down before that seemingly generous and extravagant but actually quite austere figure. Just as our inherited metaphysical assumption has been that the center must hold in order for everything to hang together, our traditional literary assumption has been that in order to truly love language and truly appreciate great writing, to truly affirm fiction and truly value its meaning, we pretty much had to put all our faith in “the author.” The truth, as we for some reason still call it, may be quite the contrary, and the deconstruction of these conventional assumptions might radically renew our “literary” appreciation, our “joyous affirmation,” of the fiction that we read, the fiction that we write, the fictions that we are.15 15

Excursus on the joys of being fictional: While some may take exception to being referred to as fictions, others don’t mind the appellation and even find it “intriguing.” In “ ‘Theorizing in a Void’: Sublimity, Matter, and Physics in Black Feminist Poetics,” Zakiyyah Iman Jackson quotes Dionne Brand’s 2012 A Map to the Door of No Return as follows: “To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora is I think to live as a fiction—a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be a being living inside and outside of herself. It is to apprehend the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing” (2018: 634). Though of course one doesn’t necessarily have to “live in the Black Diaspora” to find the idea of living “as a fiction” more voluptuously intriguing than ontologically insulting, maybe living “as a fiction” is what helps one be able to “live in the Black Diaspora” in the first place, to live in and also up against what Jackson calls “an antiblack world” at all. To “be a kind of fiction,” to “live as a fiction,” is perhaps to live in a way that escapes or subverts the “social death” that the “antiblack world” deals to “black(ened) people” (Jackson 2020: 19) everywhere. To “inhabit a trope,” to “live as a fiction,” involves responding positively to the question we heard Foucault raise back in Lesson Five: “Couldn’t everyone’s life be a work of art?” It is to let a fully democratic bioaesthetics meld with a Black Feminist Poetics (even if one can’t claim to be a Black feminist poet oneself) in order to resist “normative” biopolitics in Foucault’s sense and “Negrophobic” necropolitics in Fanon’s and Mbembe’s—a melding that might allow us to see productive connections between what Foucault designates as “fear of the proliferation of meaning” and the phobic condition that the rap artists Public Enemy diagnosed in their 1990 album Fear of a Black Planet and that Lewis R. Gordon lays bare in Fear of Black Consciousness (2022). Finally, it seems to me that Brand’s brave articulation about being “a being living inside and outside of herself ” brilliantly captures what it might mean to live life extimately—“joying in the truth of self-division” (Kristeva 1982: 89) in a way that democratically affirms everybody’s extimacy.

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II: “What are we calling postmodernity?” Not that it matters who’s speaking here, but it happens to be Foucault, admitting (or maybe feigning) ignorance about postmodernity in a 1983 interview: “What are we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date” (Foucault 1983/1998: 447). Foucault’s interlocutor, one Gerárd Raulet, thus finds himself in the ironic position of having to bring Foucault, reputedly one of postmodernism’s principle perpetrators, up to speed on the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Jean-François Lyotard about the viability of the socalled project of modernity and the emancipatory potential of what we’re still calling postmodernity. For the German Habermas, the “project of modernity” begins with eighteenth-century “Enlightenment” rationalism; it involves “the belief, inspired by modern science, in the infinite progress of knowledge and in the infinite advance towards social and moral betterment” (Habermas 1980/2007: 1947). Though he recognizes that “the 20th century has shattered this optimism,” Habermas believes that we should still “try to hold on to the intentions of the Enlightenment, feeble as they may be” rather than “declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause” (1980/2007: 1951). Upholding the goal of a transparently “communicative rationality” operating within and governing “all spheres—cognitive, moral-practical, and expressive” (1980/2007: 1952), Habermas thinks that we should want to continue with the “progressive” modern project, which he considers “incomplete” but still completely worthwhile. He thus labels Derrida and Foucault as postmodern “young conservatives” (1980/2007: 1954) who have prematurely abandoned the progressive project out of an irrationalist Nietzschean aestheticist extravagance and a fetishistic investment in the notional expenditures of Georges Bataille. On the French side of the debate, Lyotard also notes “the disappearance of this idea of progress within rationality and freedom . . . a sort of decay in the confidence placed by the last two centuries in the idea of progress.” For Lyotard, “this idea of progress as possible, probable or necessary was rooted in the certainty that the development of the arts, technology, knowledge and liberty would be profitable to mankind as a whole.” But Lyotard thinks that contemporary thinking has become deeply distrustful of the very idea of “mankind” as a unified “whole,” and rightly so. Lyotard finds it no longer salutary to sustain the modern “belief that enterprises, discoveries and institutions are legitimate only insofar as they contribute to the [total] emancipation of mankind” (1986/2001: 1612–13). Calling this modern faith in the complete emancipation of everybody a metanarrative—a grand or master narrative, overarching and monolithic—Lyotard famously

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characterizes postmodern skepticism as a radical “incredulity towards metanarratives” (1979/1984: xxiv). For Lyotard, postmodern reality comprises incommensurable “language games,” a Humpty-Dumpty host of differential micro-narratives that the modernist metanarrative can no longer put back together again: “Only the transcendental illusion (that of Hegel [or of Sartre]) can hope to totalize [these language games] into a real unity” (1979/1984: 81).16 But Lyotard warns that “the price to pay for such an illusion is terror,” and he thus links the transcendental dreams of “completing” the project of modernity to the totalizing and totalitarian schemes of modern history. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror [and as much totality] as we can take. We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience . . . [and] for the [attempted] realization of the fantasy to seize reality . . . Let us [thus] wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. (Lyotard 1979/1984: 82)

Having summarized this French-German debate, Raulet explains to Foucault that “Postmodernity is a breaking apart of reason . . . Postmodernity reveals, at least, that reason has only been one narrative among others in history; a grand narrative, certainly, but one among many, which can now be followed by other narratives” (in Foucault 1983/1998: 447). But Foucault surprisingly responds that he’s “never clearly understood what was meant in France by the word ‘modernity’ ” in the first place. Nor does he know “what Germans mean by modernity.” Neither do I grasp the kind of problems intended by this term—or how they would be common to people thought of as being “postmodern.” While I see clearly that behind what was known as structuralism, there was a certain problem—broadly speaking, that of the subject and the recasting of the subject—[I] do not understand what kind of problem is common to the people we call “post modern” or “poststructuralist.” (1983/1998: 448)

16

In his 1960 Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre stated that his philosophical goal was “to establish that there is one human history, with one truth and one intelligibility—not by considering the material content of this history, but by demonstrating that a practical multiplicity, whatever it may be, must unceasingly totalize itself through interiorizing its multiplicity at all levels” (1960/1976: 69).

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Now, at this point, you might very well be thinking: if Foucault himself didn’t quite get “modernity” or “postmodernity,” what fat chances for understanding have I? I would answer by saying that whatever is meant by “modernity” or “structure,” Foucault is essentially correct: they aren’t simply different words for the same set of problems. And so while postmodernism and poststructuralism are “problematically” related—both involve “following” Nietzsche, questioning science, calling truth’s bluff, changing “the subject,” interrogating the absolute primacy of “reason,” activating the play of differences, protecting the proliferation of meaning, and so on—they aren’t exactly the same theoretical phenomenon. We’ve read that poststructuralism takes the specific findings of structural linguistics (the arbitrary and differential nature of the linguistic sign) to their most “extreme” conclusions. Here we’ll see how postmodernism involves a different but related set of dilemmas and extremities. Let’s begin by considering three mutually implicated aspects of “modernity,” so as to better address the question of what the “post” in “postmodernity” might entail. Let’s say that these three aspects—let’s call them socio-economic modernization, philosophical modernity, and aesthetic modernism—all involve new and different ways of coming to terms with the problematic (and always political) fact that the world must be made to mean. Socio-economic modernization involves seismic shifts in what a Marxist would call the mode of production—new ways of making wealth, goods, services, tools, machines, technologies, laws, institutions, weapons, wars, profits, governments, nations, states, colonies, and empires, what Marx himself calls the “uninterrupted disturbance of social conditions” (1888/1978: 476). Philosophical modernity involves developing (supposedly) new (and purportedly less magical, more secular/scientific) ways of making sense in and of modernization as uninterrupted disenchanted social disturbance.17

17

What leads me to insert the parenthetical qualifications “supposedly” and “purportedly less magical, more secular/scientific” into this description of philosophical modernity is my having finally read Sylvia Wynter’s 2003 essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” Wynter’s argument is that European philosophical modernity inherited the “divinely” legitimated Christian demonization of non-European “black(ened) people” and transformed that prejudice into a more “natural” rational secular/scientific animalization of those same people, and for the same oppressive/colonial/imperial purposes. In other words, semi-secular modern “Enlightenment” philosophers like Kant and Hegel could buy into the idea that racialized hierarchies were indelibly inscribed into “nature” or the “natural order of things” whether they still believed that an AuthorGod was causally responsible for the inscription or not.

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And aesthetic modernism involves new ways of making and responding to works of art within modernization/modernity. Modernization is arguably the “oldest” of these three aspects. Indeed, as Marshall Berman points out, “vast and increasing numbers of people have been going through it for close to five hundred years” (1988: 15).18 Berman writes that The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it; the industrialization of production, which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from the ancestral habitats, hurtling them half-way across the world into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth; systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the most diverse people and societies; increasingly powerful national states, bureaucratically structured and operated, constantly striving to expand their power; mass social movements of people, and peoples, challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their own lives; finally, bearing and driving all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world market. In the twentieth century, the processes that bring this maelstrom into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called “modernization.” (1988: 16, my emphases)

The “dynamic” words that I’ve emphasized in Berman’s description— changing, hurtling, striving, challenging, driving—might all be summed up in that last phrase: “a state of perpetual becoming.” And this state of perpetual(ly) becoming (modern) could be negatively compared to the sense of relatively “static being” or uninterrupted non-disturbance that we now associate (rightly or wrongly) with the pre-modern or medieval European “life-world,” in which there really didn’t seem to be much happening, in which everything

18

We can avoid undue befuddlement about the word “postmodern” by not mistaking “the modern” for the contemporary, the present day, or even the twentieth century. Western culture has been in “the modern” for quite a while. Shakespeare, for example, is now considered an “early modern” writer.

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and everybody basically seemed to stay put: no great discoveries; no big changes in images of our place in the cosmos or one’s place in the divinely ordained “natural order”; no radical transformations in knowledge effected or even desired (particularly not by the church); no appreciable social mobility, much less mass demographic upheaval; no moveable type, printing presses, or mass communications; no particularly successful challenges to autocratic rulers; no acceleration, no movement, no change. Or, in a word, no capitalism: Berman is right to say that it’s “finally” capitalist markets driving “the maelstrom of modern life” only in the sense that he lists the capitalist engine last. But it was arguably the transition in Western Europe from feudal agrarianism to mercantile capitalism that got this ball of “perpetual becoming” or “uninterrupted disturbance” rolling in the first place. It was arguably the shift from immovable to moveable capital, from arable land to investable money as the primary basis of wealth in Europe, that initiated all the increasingly rapid “movement and change” that we now associate with modernization. This shift helped precipitate the various revolutions (scientific, industrial, socio-political) by virtue of which the rulers of the ancien regime (the titled monarchs of the landed aristocracy and the stony patriarchs of the crumbling church) were suddenly or gradually forced to cede power to the more secular (and at least potentially more democratic) mercantile bourgeoisie. But more than political economy, more than an exchange of money and power, is at stake in the “modern” triumph of “movement and change” over feudal-medieval stability and stasis. There began to dawn, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, the philosophical sense that perpetual “movement and change” were revolutionary values in themselves, inherently utopian, leading somewhere pretty good or even supremely good for everybody (at least, everybody who was white); in other words, there began to form the optimistic conviction that all these ever-accelerating upheavals were not just aleatory economic transitions profitable for the rising bourgeoisie alone but morally progressive developments that would turn out to be “profitable to mankind as a whole” and would in fact lead to a final and total “emancipation of mankind.” In place of the relatively “frozen” or cyclical sense of time and history supported by feudal agrarianism (cyclical because still allegorizing seasonal cycles of planting and harvest), modern philosophes began to substitute a linear, dynamic, and dialectically progressive sense of human temporality and historicity. Moreover, in place of the anti-ameliorative ideology of “original sin” promulgated by a medieval church that condemned all talk of worldly self-improvement as hubristic heresy (no “redemption” for the fallen save through God’s mercy; no final happiness for select humans except in heaven, and so on), modern philosophy served up the purely secular

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idea of rational Enlightenment as mankind’s “original destiny” (Kant 1784/1996).19 We might note a sort of merger between “acquisitive” economic modernization and “inquisitive” philosophical modernity in a claim made by our old friend Hegel, one of the great promoters of perpetual becoming. In “The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” Hegel suggests that the principle imperative of Enlightenment rationality is to justify “the human possession of treasures formerly squandered on heaven” (1795/1948: 159). In the Enlightenment, that is, those who dared to think for themselves began thinking that we should start thinking of ourselves and should keep our most treasured thoughts to ourselves, in our own orbit, rather than squandering them on exorbitant fantasies like “God” and “heaven.” Enlightenment humanists thus attempted to give us all permission to start loving, helping, and believing in ourselves directly. Short-circuiting the old other-worldly route, Enlightenment humanist thinkers stopped projecting all the great powers of love and salvation onto the Deity and disinvested in the afterlife as the only conceivable site for the final acquisition of happiness or the total accomplishment of our own ameliorative goals, all of which could be worked out in this world through the progressive use of Reason.20 And so began for Western Europe the languid and sinister blooming of the dream of a totally rational and totally organized human self-possession. Justifying our complete ownership of treasures once squandered on the divine, hoping to gain a conceptually controlling interest in “the maelstrom of modern life,” philosophical modernity attempts a total “realization of the fantasy to seize reality” (Lyotard 1979/1984: 82). From the postmodern

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In 1784, Immanuel Kant defined Enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his selfincurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude [from Horace: ‘dare to be wise’]. Have the courage to use your own understanding” (1784/1996: 51). When Kant goes on to say that “One age cannot enter into an alliance on oath to put the next age in a position where it would be impossible for it to extend and correct its knowledge . . . or to make any progress whatsoever in enlightenment [for] this would be a crime against human nature, whose original destiny lies precisely in such progress” (1784/1996: 54), the phrase “original destiny” can be read as a rather pointed jab against the doctrine of original sin and against anyone still immature enough to fall for it. Compare Marx: “The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself ” (1844/1978: 54; Adventures: 16).

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perspective, however, the end results of this grab at reality’s fleeting ring have proven rather mixed. Not that Enlightenment humanism has produced only unmitigated disaster for humans; not that there hasn’t been some recognizable “progress within rationality and freedom” in the Western world in the last two-to-five hundred years: but the twentieth century in particular has shattered the blithe assumption that our taking up the dare to think for ourselves would necessarily advance us all towards “social and moral betterment”; it has darkened the optimistic view of human history as the inevitably beneficent upward expansion of Man’s Reason. For tooling along in the blind spot of Enlightenment’s Sunday morning drive is none other than our friend Thanatos, the good old-fashioned death drive, which you don’t have to be a licensed psychoanalyst to discern busily at work in all teleological fantasies indentured to “nostalgia for the whole and the one,” whether the fantasies be sexual, secular, philosophical, or religious, harbored by political left or right. God knows there’s more than a touch of suicidal desire in the fantasy of sending oneself to heaven, else “the Everlasting” wouldn’t have “fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter,” as Shakespeare had Prince Hamlet complain in the “early modern” year 1603. And as Walter Benjamin (a Jewish intellectual who ultimately chose suicide over probable capture by the Nazis) observed in 1936, “mankind” as the collective subject/object of mechanical modernization has reached such a degree of self-alienation “that it can experience [even] its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (1936/1968: 242). But of course the pleasures of totally human destruction, subjective and objective, failed to remain merely aesthetic in the mid-twentieth century; indeed, only a few years after Benjamin’s self-slaughter, these irresistible necropolitical urges from “beyond the pleasure principle” became real in a substantially “new and different” way. If the modern metanarrative involves the fantasy of humanly (not humanely, but humanly) possessing all the treasures formerly squandered on heaven, and if one of the great powers humans had heretofore attributed to the Deity was the capacity to reduce the world to rubble and ash, then one developing plot-line of modernity’s big story reaches its climax in 1945, when we for the first time seemed to hold the real power of world-destruction in our own tremblingly power-mad hands. Perhaps “the postmodern condition” really begins with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or perhaps it begins somewhere in the“unpresentable” distance between Auschwitz as an industrial mode of genocide and Hiroshima as a technological form of mass destruction. To be sure, the new American petard was an inspired scientific advance over the old European ovens, but one wouldn’t exactly call it progress qua “social and moral betterment.” So much, then, for the question of how we got to the “post” in philosophical postmodernity: few philosophers whole-heartedly believe in the modern

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metanarrative any longer, and incommensurable language (and war) games are still proceeding without morally progressing. If pro-modernist stalwarts complain that postmodernity involves all the social fragmentation and malaised alienation of “the maelstrom of modern life” but without the hope of total reunification and emancipation that alone makes it all bearable, the postmodernist rejoinder is that this totalizing “hope” is itself irredeemably implicated in various totalitarian daydreams of a unified “life-world” hygienically cleansed of all contaminating “others” (Jews, queers, capitalists, immigrants from “shit-hole countries”—name your poison): the darkest side of the dialectic of Enlightenment is purely instrumental reason, the racist/ fascist “male warrior” fantasy of global purification in which freedom’s just another word for nothing left to kill.21 For some philosophical postmodernists, then, the only “good war” left is Lyotard’s war against totality.22 But if the preceding explains the philosophical “postmodern turn,” how might we answer the question of “post-modernization”? How do we deal with the idea of human reality“after the end” of modernization when modernization clearly hasn’t ended? After all, there’s still a lot of “perpetual becoming” qua technological innovation going on in the world, so perhaps the term “postmodernization” is descriptive only in regard to certain “futuristic” fictions like George Miller’s Road Warrior films, which depict the coming exhaustion of petro-industrial society as a bloody struggle between nomadic hordes dueling over the last dribbles of fossil-fuel in a post-apocalyptic wasteland; or James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator, which suggests technology’s relentless continuation of its own “project” even after human civilization has ended; or David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which represents the consumer society of the very near future as being so fatally addicted to entertaining itself and so indifferent to a progressive or even linear conception of time and history that its calendar years are no longer consecutively numbered but corporately sponsored, named after illustrious commodities (Year of the Whopper, Year of Glad, Year of the Tuck’s Medicated Pad, etc.).

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See Klaus Theweleit (1987). Or read Freud, who in 1930 observed that it was not “an unaccountable chance that the dream of German world-dominion called for antisemitism as its complement; and it is intelligible that the attempt to establish a new, communist civilization in Russia should find its psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois” (1930/1989: 752). Bellicosely inscribing “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” Donna Haraway writes in her “Cyborg Manifesto” that postmodern feminists “do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction” (1985/2008: 324, 342).

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But to think less speculatively about what “post-modernization” might mean for us today, we might think in terms of a particular paradigm shift from industrial mechanics to digital technology within the contemporary mode of production itself; we might consider, that is, the way technology seems to have superseded industry as the socio-economic dominant of our global civilization; and we might ponder the changes in the experiential character of our present “life-world” consequent to this transition. The transition itself involves not only the specters of mass destruction (as in the Auschwitz to Hiroshima itinerary cited above) but the “indetermanances” of mass transportation and mass communication as well. Consider that while the paradigmatic contraption of “the modern age” is arguably the engine (steam, locomotive, automobile, jet), the paradigmatic conveyance of the postmodern condition is surely the screen (cinematic, televisual, digital, terminal). Consider as well that the shift from the former to the latter effectively and profoundly inverts and compresses human space/time relations. While the modern engine still serves to move bodies (and/as commodities) through space at ever-increasing speeds, the postmodern screen serves to bring commodified images of bodies and commodified information about commodities in ever-quickening tempos to increasingly stationary or stay-athome bodies. While our engines might still take us to work, or play, or war, our screens bring all of that business back home to us in a hi-def 3D nanosecond. While we still have asphalt highways upon which to drive our fossil-fueled or hybrid or fully electric automobiles, the “information superhighway” (to use a now rather dated phrase) is a much more important and culturally dominant thoroughfare. And while we may still want to drive our hot-rods really fast, the speed of our hard-drives and search engines has become our infinitely more vital consideration. Indeed, today, everything vital seems to have gone terminally virtual, which is why Jean Baudrillard considers “the postmodern” as the age of the simulacrum, the era of “the desert of the real itself ” (1983: 2).23 But because

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A simulacrum is a copy for which there is no original. The term is as old as Plato. But while for Plato the simulacrum is an aberration, for Baudrillard it’s the order and general rule of the day, for in postmodernity simulation “is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1983: 2). Now, on the one hand, if we take seriously Slavoj Žižek’s claim that “the virtual character of the symbolic order” of language is “the very condition of human historicity” (1999/2002: 241), then we might think there’s really nothing new about the human habitation of the “desert of the real.” On the other hand, there is something undeniably “new” and strangely unprecedented in the “late capitalist” development/destruction of our specifically human or Anthropocene desert planet. And so Achille Mbembe is right on the money when he writes in Necropolitics that “We are indeed living through a strange period of the history of humanity. One of contemporary capitalism’s paradoxes is simultaneously to create and annul time. This twofold process of

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the “engine” driving both modern/industrial and postmodern/technological “movement and change” is still very much the production of wealth and power for the ruling/owning class—rather than, say, the positive annulment of private property and the dawn of a classless society, of a fully human and humanly produced world, or the desire for the collective “experience [of] a truly democratic life” (Mbembe 2019: 181)—the Marxist Fredric Jameson throws shade on postmodernism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism” and laments quite a number of its cultural turns. In addition to mourning “the death of the subject,” Jameson bemoans what he calls the “eclipse” of lively parody by dead-pan pastiche. Both are forms of stylistic mimicry, but while parody, says Jameson,“mocks the original” style in a satiric spirit of collectively normative judgment, casting “ridicule on the private nature of . . . stylistic mannerisms and their excessiveness and eccentricity with respect to the way people normally speak or write”—pastiche is spiritless “speech in a dead language.” It is a neutral practice of . . . mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic. Pastiche is blank parody, parody that has lost its sense of humor. (1988/2007: 1957, 1958)

A particularly unamusing form of pastiche for Jameson is the “nostalgia film,” which displays its “pathological” indifference to developmental social transformation by transporting outdated cinematic styles into contemporary settings (as in Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 film Body Heat, which Jameson takes as “distant remake” of Billy Wilder’s 1944 film-noir classic Double Indemnity) or by beaming futuristic technologies into a mythic past, as in George Lucas’s heavily archetypified Star Wars saga (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .”). To Jameson, it seems

creating, accelerating, and exploding time has devastating effects on our ability to ‘forge memory,’ that is to say, at bottom, to build together spaces of collective decision-making, to experience a truly democratic life. Instead of memory, we have increased tenfold our abilities to relate stories, and all sorts of histories. But increasingly we are dealing with obsessional stories wherein the aim is to prevent ourselves from having an awareness of our condition. What is this new condition? . . . We are now living only a single desire, increasingly so on screens, from screens. The screen is the new scene. The screen does not only seek to abolish the distance between fiction and reality. It has become reality generating. It forms part of the conditions of the century” (2019: 181). For a gloss on the term Anthropocene, see Tom Cohen’s entry in the BHLCT (2019: 370–1).

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exceedingly symptomatic to find the very style of nostalgia films invading and colonizing even those movies today which have contemporary settings, as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as thought we had become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience. But if that is so, then it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself—or, at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history. (1988/2007: 1960)

Nor is Jameson amused by postmodern architecture, which, like the nostalgia film, tends to glom together different and incongruent historical styles without any sense of historical progression, and which, like pastiche in general, makes no normative judgments about its contextual urban surroundings and, worse, expresses no particular desire to transform them. For Jameson, the “great monuments of the International Style” which epitomized modernist architecture could be critically distinguished from their surrounding cities; moreover, “the act of disjunction was violent, visible, and had a very real symbolic significance,” for this stylistic gesture radically separates the new utopian space of the modern [building] from the degraded and fallen city fabric, which it thereby explicitly repudiates (although the gamble of the modern was that this new utopian space) . . . would fan out and transform [the whole urbanized world] eventually by the power of its new spatial language. (1988/2007: 1962)

The postmodern building, however, expresses neither critical judgment nor any ameliorative will to power beyond its own design parameters and is “content” to let the fallen city lie: “no further effects—no larger protopolitical utopian transformation—are either expected or desired” (1988/2007: 1962). But if conditions are alarmingly bad with postmodern structures when considered from the outside, things get even worse, even more indifferent to utopian transformation, when you pass through the entrances into their bewildering interiors. Jameson, that is, has even less fun being lost in the funhouses of consumer capitalism than he does with postmodern pastiche, and he singles out as the worst architectural offender John Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, a “mini-city” that “ideally ought not to have entrances at all (since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it), for it does not wish to be a part of the city” (1988/2007: 1962). The Bonaventure is a “postmodern hyperspace” in the lobby of which “it is quite impossible to get your bearings.” It is also the structure in which Jameson himself lost his bearings (as academic rumor has

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it) while trying to find his panel at a Modern Language Association conference being held there. Generalizing from his own interpretive experience of alienated dislocation, Jameson comes to his “principal point”: that this latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and to map cognitively its position in a mappable external world . . . This alarming disjunction between the body and its built environment . . . can itself stand as the symbol and analogue of that even sharper dilemma, which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global, multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (1988/2007: 1963).

For Jameson’s money, then, we have splendid reasons to fear postmodern “proliferations of meaning” at every level, for they are all driven by the “ahistoricizing” logic of late capitalism, in the “perpetual present” of whose invisible hand we still find ourselves caught. For Jameson, the only intellectually valid way to bite the hand that feeds us postmodern culture is constantly to obey what he calls “the imperative of all dialectical thought” and to “always historicize!” (1981: 9)—a slogan that for minds less dialectically supple than Jameson’s (or for that matter Marx’s) seems to boil down to constantly diagnosing every cognitively map-able social ill as a symptom of “the global offensives of capital” (Ahmad 1996: 284).24

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In The Political Unconscious, where he designates “always historicizing” as “the imperative of all dialectical thought” (1981: 9), Jameson also writes that “to think dialectically is to invent a space from which to think . . . two identical yet antagonistic features together all at once . . . to identify [the] twin negative [or reactionary/ideological] and positive [or progressive/utopian] features of [any] given phenomenon” (1981: 224)—even, presumably, the phenomenon of global capitalism itself, for in this description of dialectical thinking Jameson is following and lauding Marx, who in the Communist Manifesto identified both the positive/progressive/utopian and the negative/ideological/ reactionary aspects of the mercantile bourgeoisie’s ascent. Though he of course emphasizes the negative, Marx doesn’t fail to mention the positive. For example, railing against early capitalism’s already global/colonial offensives, Marx writes that “the bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization . . . It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image” (1888/1978 477). But that Marx sees this compulsory creation as simultaneously negative/reactionary/ideological and positive/progressive/utopian is made clear in the very next passage, where Marx writes that “the bourgeoisie has

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Of course, one might wonder if Jameson himself isn’t less “historicizing” here than overly generalizing about the current “incapacity of our minds.” After all, not every “individual human body” in the world gets hopelessly lost in the Bonaventure or its utopia-indifferent analogues, and some individual subjects (who are neither venture capitalists nor schizoid consumers) can cognitively map postmodern hyperspace reasonably well. One might think, moreover, that a Marxist with populist leanings (though that’s not exactly the sort of intellectual Jameson is) would smile upon certain aesthetic practices of postmodernism, practices which do their best to overturn given hierarchies and to subvert all the regnant “highnesses” of “elitist” culture. As Jameson notes, aesthetic postmodernisms “emerge as specific reactions against the established forms of high modernism . . . which conquered the university, the museum, the art gallery network and the foundations”; they efface “key boundaries or separations, most notably the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture,” so that in postmodernism “the line between high art and commercial forms seems increasingly difficult to draw” (1988/2007: 1956, emphases added). This difficulty in drawing the line, however, which often energizes the populist academic left, seems only to distress Jameson, for insofar as he remains within the Frankfurt School tradition of profound suspicion towards mass culture (rather than the Birmingham tradition of cautiously celebrating the popular), Jameson of course wants art and thought to keep their critical distance from commerce.

subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” (1888/1978: 477, emphasis added). To think dialectally with Marx here is to see that he’s simultaneously critiquing and endorsing this anti-idiotic rescue operation: to think dialectically is to hold on to the condemnation of all “the offensives of global capital”—including bourgeois imperialism/ colonialism—while not losing sight of the fact that Marx actually does prefer civilization, even bourgeois civilization, to feudal barbarity, urbanity to idiocy, science to superstition, and so on; in other words, while he frequently expresses reverence for an earlier “artisanal” (as opposed to industrial) mode of production, Marx just isn’t all that nostalgic for “the feudal relations of property” that have been “burst asunder” or the “ancient and venerable prejudices” that have been “swept away” by the “colossal productive forces” unleashed by capitalism’s “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions” (1888/1978: 476). To think undialectically, on the other hand, is to imagine that “Marxism” equals any sort of “anti-capitalism” under the sun (remember that the Southern “Agrarians,” that “blood and soil” group that I described in Lesson Seven as “the lit-crit wing of the KKK,” were also opposed to “industrial capitalism”; more currently, note the punitive opposition of neofascist Florida Governor Rick DeSantis to what he calls the “woke capitalism” of the Disney Corporation). To think undialectically is to think that Marx, were he alive today, would endorse the preservation of certain contemporary idiocies on the grounds that the idiotic preservers were heroically “resisting Western hegemony” and fighting back against “the offensives of global capital.”

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In other words, he would concur with Habermas that “when the containers of an autonomously developing cultural sphere are shattered, the contents get dispersed. Nothing remains from a desublimated meaning or a destructured form; an emancipatory effect does not follow” (1980/2007: 1952).25 But here a question of cultural and intellectual authority emerges: who gets to decide what counts as a bona fide “emancipatory effect”? An “effect”—a discernible change in the interpretive experience of “the subject,” a particular activation of difference or liberation of symbolic energy or desedimenting shift in cultural innovation—that might well seem emancipatory to some won’t cut much mustard in a strictly Marxist metanarrative that views any changes as “legitimate only insofar as they contribute to the [total] emancipation of mankind” (Lyotard 1986/2001: 1613) or only insofar as they help to bring about “the revolutionary transformation of social relations as a whole” (Jameson 1988: 53). Emancipatory effects in the fields of gender and sexuality, for example, will forever register as small potatoes for any Marxist meta-narrator in relation to the always much meatier dialectic of history as class antagonism. Indeed, for those who imagine themselves as the firmest adherents to the trunk of the Marxist dialectic, steadfast opposition to the

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In general, popular culture can be understood as culture that is actually produced by “the people” and which expresses their “authentic” desires. Mass culture, by contrast, is commodified stuff that is mass-produced for “the people” by the “culture industry,” which reifies and exploits their desires. We can distinguish mass from popular culture by considering the different attitudes that the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools take towards them. The name “Frankfurt School” refers to the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt in 1923. In the Frankfurt School view, writes John Fiske, “the industrialization of culture and the development of the mass media had destroyed all traces of authentic popular or folk culture . . . The culture industries . . . were crucial in enabling capitalism to saturate people’s experiences and consciousness so thoroughly as to leave no space in which to experience a noncapitalist identity or consciousness”—the consciousness of being anything other than a consumer. “The culture industries, then, were the means by which capitalism could erase any possibility of opposition and thus social change . . . They commodified people by erasing their consciousness of all needs or desires except those that could be satisfied by commodities” (1995: 324). Cultural theorists in the Birmingham School tradition view the Frankfurt School’s “critical pessimism” as “ultimately elitist because it saw people as the helpless, passive victims of the system, and denied them any agency of their own.” The Birmingham “school of thought agrees with all the criticism of industrial capitalism” launched from Frankfurt “but disagrees with the claimed totality of their effectiveness.” The Birmingham tradition “rejects the assumption that the people have no resources of their own from which to derive their coping strategies, their resistances, and their own culture.” For Fiske, contemporary popular culture is unproductive but still creative: it “is typically bound up with the products and technologies of mass culture, but its creativity consists in its ways of using these products and technologies, not in producing them” (Fiske 1995: 325). See also John Frow’s chapter on “Cultural Studies” (140–50) and Aaron Jaffe’s chapter on “Popular Culture” (202–15) in the BHLCT.

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predations of late capitalism and Western neoliberalism sublates all “other” considerations, so that any new developments within postmodernity will be suspected as the free market’s latest ruse, and even the most retrograde and anti-modern practices of sexual oppression in various regions of the world—murderous persecution of LGBTQ people, fascistic fatwas against advocates of “gender mixing” or “gender freedoms,” female genital cutting (a.k.a. FGC), “honor killings” of young women—can be countenanced, since those who continue to enforce these traditions can be viewed as defending their cultures against globalization, resisting colonization by the neoliberal West.26 We’ll return to this problem in the next section, which attends more closely to postcolonial theory. Let’s conclude this section, however, by taking up in greater detail the two aspects of aesthetic postmodernism that Jameson

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Globalization is “a term drawn from economics to refer to the dominant model of contemporary manufacture, consumption and political systems within capitalist societies. Rather than focusing upon the needs of a local or national market, the globalized approach considers the world or ‘global village’ as its end user. Because such an audience encompasses a wide range of peoples and values, globalized practices inevitably use models of ‘best fit’. Many times these values reflect a corporation’s Western origin, with the result that some critics accuse globalization of favouring Western interests and norms” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 195). As for “honor killings,” these “are widely reported in the Middle East and South Asia, but in recent years they have taken place in Italy, Sweden, Brazil, and Britain. According to Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, there are 5,000 instances annually when women and girls are shot, stoned, burned, buried alive, strangled, smothered and knifed to death by fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, even mothers in the name of preserving family ‘honor.’ ” (New York Times, July 13, 2010, A22). Meanwhile, as Stephanie Nolen reports, in countries (like Sierra Leone) that still practice it, the FGC ritual “is normally carried out at the onset of puberty, although there are areas of the country where it is done on girls who are much younger.” The practice “involves excision of the clitoris and labia minora with a razor” and is required for “entrance into bondo, or ‘the society,’ a term for the gender-andethnicity groups that control much of life” in Sierra Leone. As Nolen further reports, “Refusing bondo comes at great social cost. Women who have not joined are, by custom if not by law, not permitted to marry; to represent their communities in religious or cultural events; to participate in celebrations or funerals; or to serve as chief or in Parliament” (New York Times, June 14, 2022, D5). Now, given these (updated) facts and figures about honor killings and FGC, I confess that, even at the risk of coming off as a hegemonically “white feminist supremacist,” I still read Aimé Césaire’s “searing” critique of colonialism, his discourse about “societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined . . . religions smashed . . . [and] extraordinary possibilities wiped out” (1955/2000: 43) by colonialism, with mixed feelings. I still feel like asking about the extraordinary possibilities wiped out or cut away by those very cultures, institutions, and religions, asking why some (blatantly misogynist) practices deserve not to be undermined, trampled, smashed, even if they owe their demise to the neoliberal forces of Western globalization. But for all the reasons my feelings, mixed or unmixed, really shouldn’t matter, see the chapter called “Honor Killings, FGC, and White Feminist Supremacy” in Zakaria (2021).

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singles out: the reaction against “high modernism” and the effacement of the boundary between “high” and “mass” culture. It’s easy enough to cognitively map “high modernism” in terms of periods and players: its time-frame stretches from just before the First World War to just after the Second World War (with the greatest wave cresting in the period entre deux guerres). Its most prominent practitioners would include Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Matisse, Rothko, and Pollock in the visual arts; Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg in music; and Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Woolf, Faulkner, Stevens, and Hemingway, etc., in literature. What characterizes all these aesthetic practices at their heights is the relentless will to experimentation and innovation, the need to draw a line between current artistic procedures and those immediately preceding, the imperative (as per Ezra Pound’s famous slogan) to always “make it new.” Aesthetic modernism involves “the vertiginous work” of questioning all the given “rules of image and narration,” so that “all that has been received, if only yesterday . . . must be suspected” (Lyotard 1979/1984: 79). Aesthetic postmodernism thus involves the work that must be done when modernist practices themselves become the all too given, received, established, when formerly vertiginous work no longer provokes even the slightest unease, much less vertigo, in the viewer, listener, or reader. In other words, postmodernism “occurs” when the aesthetic value of experimentation is itself (experimentally) called into question, which is what Lyotard means when he says that modernism had to be postmodernist in order to stay modernist: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (1979/1984: 79). But let’s linger with the question of modernism’s nascence. Habermas is correct to say that the modernist “movement” in painting and literature began “in the mid-19th century” when “color, lines, sounds and movement ceased to serve primarily the cause of representation,” when “the media of expression and the techniques of production became the aesthetic object” (1980/2007: 1952). But how do we account for this modernist non servium to the cause of representation? In a sense, Western painting has always served that cause in some form or another, but what Habermas means is that the self-defining gesture of modernist art is to abjure verisimilitude, to decline “realistic” representation. In terms of the history of painting in the West, we can say that the cause of representational realism was first taken up by Giotto in the fourteenth century, with his development of perspective, the specific technique that gives the viewer of a painting the “realistic” impression of three-dimensions, of depth within scene depicted in the frame. Before Giotto, European painting, however otherwise vivid, was noticeably “flat” in a number of senses: spatially

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two-dimensional (and so somewhat “cartoonish” from our perspective); temporally anachronistic (for the painter wasn’t expected to accurately “frame” any single moment of historical time); facially expressionless and thematically “monoto-theistic” (for the painter’s job was not to capture human emotion but to depict identifiable allegorical figures from Christian mythology). For some time after Giotto, Western art may have remained religiously themed, but it became ever more realistically framed. And European painting continued in its servitude to verisimilitude, obeying the rules of perspective and serving the cause of representation, even as it dropped religious content and joined the party trying to justify the human possession of treasures formerly squandered on heaven. Painting continued to adhere to the rules of spatio-temporal realism, that is, until it entered the age of mechanical reproduction and confronted the new reality of the camera, a little mechanical invention capable of serving “the cause of representation” much more faithfully and meticulously than painting ever could. Painting, from then on, in order to serve the cause not of verisimilitude but of painting, had to abandon realistic representation, had to perform aesthetic feats of which the camera would be incapable; painting had to distinguish itself from mechanical photography by turning its own autonomy, its own specifically painterly “techniques of production,” into the very content of its self-presentation. What the modern “abstract” painting conveys to its viewer is not the artist’s power to serve up a slice of real life but rather the essential “painterliness” of painting itself. And one of the first steps in establishing painting’s autonomy by breaking the rules of pictorial realism was the abolition of perspective (as in Gauguin), followed in short order by the conspicuous foregrounding of the brushstroke (Van Gogh, Cézanne), the flattening out of multiple perspectives effected by the cubists (Picasso and Braque), and finally the jettisoning of even minimally mimetic content (the pristine geometries of Mondrian, the color fields of Rothko, the pure action paintings of Pollock, and so on). All of these painterly breaks with realism (and breaks with the immediately preceding breaks with realism) were precipitated by modernism’s flight from photography.27 It isn’t that modernism dismissed photography or cinema as art-forms in their own right; rather, modernist painting staked its autonomy as an art-form on its critical distance from “the cause of representation” as served by these new media. Given this steady rejection, however, it should be relatively easy to see what’s postmodern in the painterly embrace of

27

I rehearse here arguments about modern art first made by Clement Greenberg. See Clark (1982).

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photography represented by the “photorealism” of Chuck Close or some of the work of Gerhardt Richter: in a sense, both painters paint their rejection of painting’s rejection of the photographic image. If, moreover, the “essential virtue” of high modernism was its “staying power” against “spreading ooze of Mass Culture” (Macdonald 1957/1998: 35)—against advertising jingles, standardized Hollywood schlock, pulp fiction, kitsch, porn, comics, television, rock ’n’ roll, and so on—then it’s relatively easy to see what’s postmodern in “pop art,” in Andy Warhol’s promiscuously lithographed Campbell’s Soup cans, Elvis Presleys, and Marilyn Monroes, the replicated comic book panels of Roy Lichtenstein, or the porn-inspired statuary of Jeff Koons. But the “relative ease” with which postmodern art can be seen, consumed, or “used” is for some the very heart of its problem. Jameson, again, writes that postmodernism’s effacement of the boundary between high and mass culture “is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture . . . and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing in its initiates” (1988/2007: 1956). And yet, from a radically different academic standpoint—that of the branch of contemporary critical inquiry known as cultural studies—it’s a mistake of the highest order to think that “difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing” aren’t needed to negotiate with mass and/or popular culture or that the consumers of such culture are merely manipulated dupes who don’t know how to read, listen, or see. A decidedly postmodern academic phenomenon, cultural studies takes its cues rather indiscriminately from all manner of Marxist social theory (Frankfurtean, Birminghamian,Althusserian, Gramscian); from feminism and gender studies; from Derridean speculation on difference and Foucauldian analytics of power; and, particularly, from the early semiological acrobatics of Roland Barthes, who demonstrated back in his 1957 text Mythologies that “difficult and complex skills of reading” could be quite productively lavished on such items of contemporary French popular culture as professional wrestling, striptease, Citroëns, and soap-powders. But here we can let Barthes be our bridge to the question of postcolonial theory as an “anti-Western” extension of European poststructuralism and postmodernism.28 For a major political reality informing Barthes’ writing in the 1950s is the French colonial presence in Algeria. Indeed, in White

28

In Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Robert Young presents poststructuralism “as an extension of anticolonial movements in the ‘Third World,’ arguing that poststructuralism developed as an anti-Western strategy ‘directed against the hierarchal cultural and racial assumptions of European thought’ ” (Gikandi 2004: 99; Young 2001: 67).

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Mythologies, Robert Young argues“that the historical roots of poststructuralism are to be found not in the crisis of European culture associated with the student revolts of 1968, but in the Algerian struggle against colonialism ten years earlier” (Gikandi 2004: 99). So it isn’t exactly irrelevant that one of Barthes’ more dazzling semiotic performances in Mythologies involves deciphering the cover-image of a Paris-Match magazine showing a “Negro in a French uniform [. . .] saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on the tricolor” (1957/1985: 116; Adventures 83). The cover is of course operating “mythologically,” in Barthes’ sense, attempting to “turn history into nature” by imposing a “depoliticized” image of social reality upon the very reality of the social. And Barthes says that he sees “very well” what this mythic cover attempts to “depoliticizingly” signify: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. (1957/1985: 116; Adventures 83)

Barthes understands fully well that French colonialism is more than simply “alleged,” that French imperialism isn’t all that great and that the “socalled oppressors” are so called for excellent empirical reasons.29 He understands that Anglo-European colonialism and imperialism are real social structures, the actual socio-economic sources of “the steady immiseration of the large majority of the world’s population” (Lazarus 2004b: 27). But later on in his performance, when Barthes insists that what this naturalizing image of the saluting African constitutively occludes is nothing but “the contingent, historical, in one word: fabricated, quality of colonialism” (1957/1985: 143; Adventures 88), that “one word: fabricated ” turns out to be a fighting word, adumbrating postcolonial studies as the site of some particularly difficult and complex struggles over the proliferation of meaning in a “Third World” that, like any other world, must be made to mean. As we’ll eventually see, the agon of postcolonial studies pits “Third World” intellectuals who “always historicize” from a critical position of epistemological realism against those purportedly less political theorists who take a woefully “cultural” approach to all the fabrications of empire—and who thus, according to their

29

Robert Young points out that “One and a half million Algerians died in the war for independence” (2001: ix)

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realist adversaries, end up “endorsing the cultural claims of transnational capital itself ” (Ahmad 1996: 285).

III: “something strange to me, although it is at the very heart of me” We’ll begin with two very different theoretical writers, both influenced by Foucault, who describe their respective objects of inquiry in such remarkably similar terms that “the celebrated Foucauldian nexus between knowledge and power becomes clear in the arenas of both colonial relations and gender relations” (Bahri 2004: 205). The one, Edward Said, describes his object of analysis as “a logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections” (1979: 8; Adventures: 210); the other, Eve Sedgwick, describes hers as “an array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and knowledges” (1990: 29). Said is of course describing Orientalism, “the imaginative examination of things Oriental [. . .] based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged” (1979: 8; Adventures: 210), while Sedgwick is examining “something legitimately called sex or sexuality,” something that “is all over the experiential and conceptual map” and which represents “the full spectrum of positions between the most intimate and the most social, the most predetermined and the most aleatory, the most physically rooted and the most symbolically infused, the most innate and the most learned, the most autonomous and the most relational traits of being” (1990: 29). Both theorists, then, address a certain “something” that is not simply empirically real but is so constitutively “constructed” or “fabricated” as to require constant and complex mapping and remapping. Said assumes “that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography” (1979: 4–5; Adventures: 207). Sedgwick follows Freud and Foucault in extending Vico’s great observation to human sexuality; Sedgwick assumes that “the distinctly sexual nature of human sexuality has to do precisely with its excess over or potential difference from the bare choreographies of procreation,” and she stresses that “the definitional narrowing-down in this century of sexuality as a whole to a binarized calculus of homo- or heterosexuality is a weighty fact but an entirely historical one” (1990: 29, 31). Following Said and Sedgwick, then, we can note that neither Orientalism nor sexuality, neither geographical nor sexual

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“orientation,” is merely empirical, natural, or inevitable; all of our orientations are inextricably caught up in the graphic, the rhetorical, the fabricated, “the constructed, the variable, the representational” (Sedgwick 1990: 29); all are inscribed in the socio-historical nexus of asymmetrical “knowledge and power” relations. As Deepika Bahri points out,“the power of representation as an ideological tool” is such that “those with the power to represent and describe others clearly control how those others will be seen” (2004: 205). Hence, for Said, Orientalism is a powerful representational/ideological tool. Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. I have found it useful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse . . . to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (1979: 3)

Sedgwick similarly employs Foucault’s notions to consider “sex/sexuality” discursively, as a corporate institution for representing and dealing with bodies and pleasures both “normal” and “perverse,” both within and beyond the “bare choreographies of procreation.” For Foucault, human sexuality is not a timeless natural/instinctual force that can be repressed but a historicodiscursive deployment that can be systematically managed or even produced. And for Foucault, sex has been produced, particularly “during the postEnlightenment period,” as “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power” (1976/1990). For Foucault and Sedgwick, then, sexual identities or orientations are always social representations rather than merely empirical facts: like the Occident and the Orient, “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” are no more “merely there” than is the “binarized calculus” that produces and reduces them. Now, the point of this mutual articulation of the postcolonial critic Said with the queer theorist Sedgwick is that, precisely in being transfer points for relations of power, colonial and sexual relations are also particularly dense transfer points for each other, and that all these power transfers can be facilitated and contested, analyzed and discussed, in the cultural and political

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arenas of representation/fabrication. Arguably, all the dominant fictions to date have attempted to ensure that Orientalism—as “a distribution of geopolitical awareness” and an “elaboration” of a “basic geographical distinction” in which “the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident” (Said 1979: 12; Adventures: 214)—is wedded to institutional heterosexism and misogyny. In other words, we can observe what Donna Haraway calls “the close ties of sexuality and instrumentality” (1985/2008: 340) in the ongoing work of culturally constructing both colonial and sexual relations. And we have only to glance at a few scenes from classical Hollywood cinema to see with what success the Occident fabricates itself in and as the sovereign hetero-masculine “hero” and constructs the Oriental “other” as the passively feminized, the criminally abject, and/or the treacherously queer. Consider, for example, the entrance of dandy criminal Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre)—announced by strains of Levantine “snake-charming” music simultaneously whimsical and sinister—into the office of detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon. Cairo’s calling card reeks of gardenia, while his cane-handling antics none too subtly suggest oral/anal receptivity to penetration. He carries multiple “false” passports, and hence has no single “true” national origin or identity, but there’s no mistaking the various global and sexual “regions” we should suppose Mr. Cairo to represent. Nor should we doubt that the violence our Western hero and straight arrow Sam Spade inflicts against those “regions”— Middle Eastern but fully nether—is justified, if not desired: when Cairo angrily objects to being struck by Spade, the detective coolly responds: “when you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it.” Or consider Howard Hawks’1946 film The Big Sleep. Here detective Philip Marlowe (Bogart again) finds himself having to snoop into a rare bookstore that is actually a front for a criminal ring of blackmailing pornographers. To prepare for this reconnoiter, Marlowe conducts research in the Hollywood Public Library, arming himself with knowledge about a “Chevalier Audubon 1840” and a Ben Hur 1860 “with an erratum on page one-sixteen.” When the young bespectacled female librarian tells Marlowe that he doesn’t “look like a man who would be interested in first editions,” Marlowe asserts his hardboiled private dick-iness with the retort that he also “collects blondes in bottles.” But when he’s just about to enter his target, Geiger’s Rare Books, Marlowe realizes that to play his part convincingly he really should look rare and bookish himself, so pushes up the brim of his hat and pulls his sunglasses down his nose and begins behaving in the mincing, effeminate, and bitchy way that codes him as queer as per the standard performative conventions of 1940s Hollywood film.

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It’s an apt disguise, for it turns out that Geiger is not exactly a “real man” himself but rather a homosexual with a “shadow” (a young male consort and “gunsel” named Carol), not to mention a glass eye and a “Charlie Chan mustache.” But that last detail is only one of the very many that serves to “Orientalize” Geiger and his enterprises, for his bookstore is positively saturated with Asian artifacts and decorations. He’s got Buddhas out the wazoo, so to speak, and all these Oriental motifs are brought into even stronger relief when Marlowe pulls out of Geiger’s and trots across the street to the opposing and conspicuously Occidentalized “Acme Bookstore.” Here our hero drops his queer act, straightforwardly reveals himself as “a private dick on a case,” and so gets some straight information and (we infer) some straight sex from the knowledgeable and accommodating proprietress (Dorothy Malone)—and all with a presidential seal of approval, for there’s a legitimizing portrait of not Buddha but FDR himself looking down on these upstanding heterosexual citizens from the Acme Bookstore’s wall. In the counterfeit presentment of two bookstores, then, we behold a spectacularly “binarized calculus,” an active distribution of both geopolitical and eroticized awareness: on the Acme side of the street, we find a stronghold of knowledge and power; we find truth, justice, and the American way (of having sex); while on the Orientalized side we find only criminal deception, perversion, artifice, and ignorance (the “girl in Geiger’s bookstore” doesn’t know anything about books, while glass-eyed Geiger reportedly “affects a knowledge of antiques and hasn’t any”). If “Acme” is the pinnacle, the very top, then Geiger, like Cairo, is clearly a bottom. Thus does Hollywood at its heights put the ass in Asiatic, insert itself and its powers of representation into every open orifice in the Oriental market, a colonizing gesture if there ever was one.30 If, however, you were to stop me here with the suggestion that I ease up on the wordplay and “get real”; if you were to insist upon firmly distinguishing cultural or merely representational colonization from “the real thing”; if you were to point out that “no actual Asians were harmed in the making of these films,” then you would not only be animalizing Asian people (via the ASPCA language that I’m putting in your mouth) and further contributing to what David Eng and Shinhee Han call “Racial Melancholia,” but you would be missing Deepika Bahri’s point about “the power of representation as an

30

For more on The Big Sleep in particular and Hollywood Orientalism in general, see White (1988).

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ideological tool.”31 But you might well complain about my using these or any other cinematic examples anyway, citing them as sorry signs of the misbegotten “culturalist emphasis in postcolonial studies” (Lazarus 2004a: 9). You might hate the way I’ve chosen to frame this discussion, taking my insistence upon serving up Said and Sedgwick side by side as symptomatic of the standard bourgeois Western male intellectual’s incapacity to think of “the Orient” or “the Other” except in the “exotic” terms of sex, or the sexy terms of “culture.” After all, isn’t it just like a postmodernist/cultural studies/queer theory type to revert, in what should be a serious discussion of postcolonialism, to the relative safety of campy close readings of Humphrey Bogart films to the exclusion of any consideration of history, social context, political economy, or “the international division of labor” (Bahri 2004: 201)? And isn’t it all too predictably Eurocentric to keep employing the Frenchman Foucault to critically limn Orientalism when that perpetrator of non-Marxist historicism might very well have been not only a “young conservative,” as Habermas calls him, but even a “new Orientalist,” as per the analysis of Ian Almond (2007)? These questions stem from the serious reservations certain Marxist critics hold about some of the most prominent postcolonial theorists, who are perceived as being overly indentured to the poststructuralist/postmodernist idea “that language (in the broad sense) is not only world-disclosing but also world-constituting” (Lazarus 2004a: 11). Said himself is even a bit suspect for ever having employed the discursive theories of Michel “I have never been a Marxist” Foucault. But the main culprits here seem to be Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha: Spivak, the translator of Derrida whose difficult representations of the unrepresentability of subaltern speech “come close to fetishizing difference under the rubric of incommensurability” (Lazarus 2004a: 10), and Bhabha, whose own “postcolonial perspective resists the attempt at holistic forms of social explanation” (Bhabha 1994: 173)—a resistance considered by Marxists to be “constitutively anti-Marxist” (Lazarus 2004a: 4)—and whose gnarly ruminations on hybridity and liminality are thus, according to his

31

See Eng and Han (2018). But also consider the question of the ideological power of “mere” representation in light of the huge surge in anti-Asian violence in the U.S. in recent (post-Covid) years. Writing in the wake of the “spa shootings” in Atlanta in March of 2021, May Jeong (2021) reminds us that “structural violence against Asians in the United States has long been institutionalized” and points out that the shooter, one Robert Aaron Long, 21, was “a white man born in 21st-century America, a country with a rich history of violence against Asians. A place where the previous president was among the first to call Covid-19 the “Kung Flu,” and the “China virus,” possibly sowing the seeds for the nearly 3,800 acts of violence against Asians—mostly women—that followed” (np).

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adversaries, really only consumerist celebrations complicit with the global offensives of late capitalism.32 Aijaz Ahmad writes that the entire logic of the kind of cultural ‘hybridity’ that Bhabha celebrates presumes the intermingling of Europe and non-Europe in a context already determined by advanced capital, in the aftermath of colonialism . . . The underlying logic of this celebratory mode is that of the limitless freedom of a globalized marketplace that pretends that all consumers are equally resourceful and in which all cultures are equally available for consumption, in any combination that the consumer desires . . . This playful ‘hybridity’ conceals the fact that commodified cultures are equal only to the extent of their commodification. At the deepest level, however, the stripping of all cultures of their historicity and density . . . produces not a universal equality of all cultures but the unified culture of a Late Imperial marketplace that subordinates cultures, consumers and critics alike to a form of untethering and moral loneliness that wallows in the depthlessness and whimsicality of postmodernism—the cultural logic of Late Capitalism, in Jameson’s superb phrase. (1996: 290)

For Marxists like Ahmad, however, the main problem with the hybrid intermingling of poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism is that this theoretical mash-up seems to demolish the very possibility of intellectual critique in the sense that Marxism inherits from the Enlightenment

32

The term subaltern “designates non-elite or subordinated social groups. It problematises humanist concepts of the sovereign, autonomous subject, since the subaltern has been overlooked in the accounts of and by the elite. The subaltern emerges not as a positive identity complete with a sovereign self-consciousness, but as the product of a network of differential, potentially contradictory identities” (Woods 2009: 49). Meanwhile, hybridity and liminality are terms Bhabha uses to “stress the mutual interdependence and construction of selfhood that exists between a colonizer and a colonized person.” For Bhabha, hybridity “refers to a ‘third space’ or ‘in-between space’ which emerges from a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions, like the colonial power and the colonized culture” (Woods 2009: 51), though Bhabha insists that hybridity “is not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures” (Bhabha 1994: 113) and that its purpose is to intervene “in the exercise of authority not merely to indicate the impossibility of identity but to represent the unpredictability of its presence” (1994: 114), and to terrorize authority “with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery” (1994: 115). Liminality, writes Woods, “derives from the Latin word ‘limen’ meaning ‘threshold’, and like ‘hybridity’ refers to an ‘in-between space’ . . . of symbolic interaction, which is distinguished from the more definite notion of a ‘limit’.” Woods also comments that “Bhabha’s concept of hybridity fits the poststructuralist attack on totalities and essentialisms” (2009: 52); for Ahmad, however, this “fit” links Bhabha’s postcolonialism to an “apocalyptic antiMarxism” that “playfully” abolishes “nationalism, collective historical subjects and revolutionary possibility as such” (Ahmad 1996: 283).

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tradition. Faithfully representing that tradition, Neil Lazarus writes that “our methodological assumption would be that it is always in principle (and indeed in practice) possible to stand outside any given problematic in order to subject its claims to scrutiny. This, of course is the classical notion of critique as encountered in Immanuel Kant and exemplified most significantly for radical scholarship in Karl Marx’s various critiques” (2004a: 12). Also privileging radical scholarly exteriority, Ahmad critiques the following formulation from Spivak’s Outside in the Teaching Machine—“This impossible ‘no’ to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position, and the everyday here and now of ‘postcoloniality’ is a case of it” (1993: 281)—by describing Spivak’s variance from Said, for whom “the line of demarcation between the so-called ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ intellectuals was that the ‘colonial’ ones spoke from positions imbibed within metropolitan culture while ‘postcolonial’ ones spoke from outside those positions” (1996: 277, 278). Now, since “the deconstructive philosophical position” that Spivak promotes does, in principle and in practice, question all lines of demarcation and all resulting positions or dispositions, deconstruction and the general “consent to theoretical postmodernity” (Ahmad 1996: 283) would indeed seem to disturb if not destroy the Enlightenment ideal of a pure critical exteriority, the traditional scholarly ideal of speaking “truth to power” from some absolutely objective outside. But do deconstruction and postmodernism in their exceedingly Nietzschean inheritance truly kill the switch on “critique” altogether? Must “critique” always establish its Enlightenment bona fides, its pure exteriority to its problematic, to count as having any resistant or transformative value, any potential for generating any emancipatory effects whatsoever? Can scholars not attempt to critique particular structures that they could never help but intimately inhabit? Is there nothing but untethered moral loneliness to be gained from an“extimate” critique of (but still in) postmodern indetermanance? The postmodern/poststructuralist answer to these questions is that that there’s no compelling reason, after all, why the lack of pure exteriority, the “interpretive experience” of liminal hybridity, or the actually lived “coincidence of utter alterity with absolute proximity” (Žižek 1999/2008: 368) should stop anyone from addressing a problematic, subjecting competing truth-claims to scrutiny, or exposing any particular logic (even one’s own) as being “governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections” (Said 1979: 8; Adventures: 210). But perhaps, in a spirit of postmodern humility, a responsible scholar in and of “the everyday here and now” should imagine stopping short of imagining that he or she addresses any problematic from some Archimedean point purely exterior to it, much less that the “subject position” or cognitive

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encampment from which one launches one’s critique is itself anything other than an all-too-human battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections, “something strange to me, although it is at the very heart of me” (Lacan 1986/1992: 71). In other words, in the interests of “getting real,” of being responsive to (neither completely outside of nor utterly complicit with) our times, one might cease dreaming that one can finally hoist one’s critical fabrications up the long flagpole of transcendence and into the immaculate ether of some purely exterior “truth.” One might call time-out (or even gameover) on this metaphysical dream, this fantasy of truly seizing reality, without thereby sacrificing theoretical militancy, without admitting surrender, capitulation, or defeat. Perhaps deconstruction as radically “extimate” critique— beginning “from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every ‘is’ ” (Lucy 2004: 11), committed to the cause of “dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting ‘out of joint’ the authority of [any] ‘is’ ” (Derrida 1995: 25) that there is—is “constitutively anti-Marxist” or an exercise in “apocalyptic anti-Marxism,” to repeat the words of Lazarus and Ahmad. But such a critique could never hope to remain proliferatively deconstructive while at the same time totally opposing the emancipatory project of modernity or absolutely dispossessing itself from what Derrida calls the “spiritual inheritance” of Marx.33 Such, one might say, is the tall tale of deconstruction, the “nonmoral” moral of the postmodern story. And “hence [as Foucault did say at the end of an essay called “Truth and Power”] the importance of Nietzsche” (1977/2000: 133).

IV: We must all fail better In the first edition of Ten Lessons in Theory, I concluded Lesson Nine as you’ll have just read—with Foucault’s powerful truth-claim about the importance of Nietzsche. Let’s say that I was making a stab at “formal closure,” trying to let my story about the story about the three “posts” (the poststructural, the postmodern, the postcolonial) end on the very important name with which it began: Nietzsche. But this time I don’t want to let any of these pale male European names be Lesson Nine’s final words. This time I’m going to bend it like Beckett and try to “fail better” at wrapping up this lesson by turning to recent writing from an African postcolonial theorist whose name I’ve already mentioned, writing 33

Derrida speaks complexly but affirmatively of this inheritance throughout Specters of Marx (1994). Marxists of various stripes speak complexly but not always affirmatively of Derrida in Ghostly Demarcations (Sprinker, ed., 1999).

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that sounds more Sartrean and Habermasian than Lyotardian, writing that isn’t utterly incredulous toward metanarrative, writing that doesn’t exactly echo Nietzsche or explicitly endorse Derrida’s il n’y a pas de hors-texte but does help underscore this text’s unwavering insistence on semiotic materialism, on the linguistic foundation of any and all human reality whatsoever, on the inescapable materiality of language itself in a world that must be made to mean.34 Towards the end of his 2019 Necropolitics, in a section entitled “Emancipation of the Living,” Achille Mbembe writes: Democracy is in crisis everywhere, including in the old countries that have laid claim to it for so long. It is undergoing, probably more so than yesterday, enormous difficulties in recognizing the full and complete value of memory and speech as foundations of a human world that we will all share together and of which it is up to the public sphere to take care. Evoking speech and language here is important not only thanks to their power of revelation and their symbolic function but above all to their materiality. In every truly democratic regime, a materiality of speech exists that stems from the fact that, at bottom, all we have is speech and language for giving utterance to ourselves, to the world, and for acting on this world. (2019: 181–2)

And at the end of his 2017 Critique of Black Reason, in an epilogue called “There is Only One World,” Mbembe articulates what it might mean for us to give utterance to ourselves and to act on this (one) world in a “truly democratic,” restitutional, and reparative way that might finally lead all of us toward “the fullness of humanity,” toward “progress for humanity,” and toward “the fulfillment of universal justice” (2017: 182).35 34

35

In case you’ve forgotten, the bit about bending it like Beckett hails from the latter’s line, first discussed back in the Preface: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (1980: 89) “There is therefore only one world, at least for now, and that world is all there is. What we all therefore have in common is the feeling or desire that each of us must be a full human being. The desire for the fullness of humanity is something we all share. And, more and more, we also all share the proximity of the distant. Whether we want to or not, the fact remains that we all share this world. It is all that there is, and all that we have. To build a world that we share, we must restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. From this perspective, the concept of reparation is not only an economic project but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repairing broken links, relaunching the forms of reciprocity without which there can be no progress for humanity. Restitution and reparation, then, are at the heart of the very possibility of the construction of a common consciousness of the world, which is the basis for the fulfillment of universal justice” (Mbembe 2017: 182).

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Earlier in Necropolitics, however, Mbembe gives utterance to himself in a way that gives me pause, that makes me hesitate to let his words be the very last ones in this lesson. In the passage that concerns me, Mbembe bemoans “a certain rotten feminism [. . .] for which equality [. . .] rhymes with the dutyto-make-the-veiled-Muslim-girl-wear-a-thong” (2019: 60).36 Now, please don’t get me wrong. Even though I’m pretty sure this is the only mention of the word “feminism” in Necropolitics; even though Mbembe here gives the impression that he’s more concerned with exposing the Western world’s “manipulation of questions of gender for racist ends” (61) than he is with considering “questions of gender” in and of themselves; even though he’s understandably more invested in demonstrating that “[d]espite all the horrors of the Negro slave trade, colonialism, fascism, Nazism, the Holocaust, and other massacres and genocides, Western nations [. . .] continue to mobilize racism in aid of all manner of more or less harebrained and murderous histories” (61) than he is in exploring the ways transnational rape culture, global sexual violence, and world-wide femicide relate to the themes of sovereignty and slaughter that saturate his study, I’m not suggesting that Achille Mbembe thinks that all the feminism in the world is “rotten.”37 I’m not suggesting that Mbembe is mobilizing questions of race for anti-feminist ends or that he’s displaying what I’ll let bell hooks call “the blatant antifeminism

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In the endnote following this complaint, Mbembe references two books without elaborating on them or saying which one is rotten: Nacira Guénif-Soulimas and Éric Macé’s 2004 Les Féministes et le garcon arabe and Joan Wallach Scott’s 2009 The Politics of the Veil. I haven’t read either one, but I have a hard time imagining that Joan Scott or any other actual feminist would seriously advocate forcing Muslim girls to wear thongs. I would add that in my own view any “cultural intervention,” secular or religious, that compels any female to wear any garment, face-concealing or ass-revealing, is by definition sexually oppressive—which is to say, rotten. I should also stress that feminism isn’t Mbembe’s actual target here. Rather, he’s rightly aiming at certain white masculinist “manipulation[s] of questions of gender for racist ends.” As he writes: “Just as in the colonial era, the disparaging interpretation of how Negroes and Muslim Arabs ‘treat their women’ engages in a mix of voyeurism and envy—envy of the harem. The manipulation of questions of gender for racist ends, by way of illustrating the Other’s masculine domination, is almost always aimed at concealing the reality of phallocracy at home” (2019: 60–1). Finally, I would note that Mbembe’s critique of white supremacist envy of the racialized Other’s supposedly unbridled phallocratic enjoyment of and “masculine domination” over “their women” is consistent with recent Lacanian analyses of racism and the violent “extimacies” of antiblackness. See Khan (2018), Zalloua (2020), McGowan (2020), Marriot (2021), and George and Hook (2022). Mbembe writes that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. This sums up what Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has asserted its control” (2019: 66).

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characteristic of many black male thinkers” (1994: 127). Nor am I suggesting that anyone should dismiss Mbembe’s dazzling work because of this one cheap shot against feminism or for his being more Foucaultian/Fanonian than feminist in his theoretical orientation. I’m simply saying that I don’t want to let Foucault or Fanon or Nietzsche or Mbembe or any male names be the last names in, or any men’s words to be the final words of, this particular lesson this time around. For though I’m not saying that Mbembe is manipulating questions of race for misogynist ends, I’m also not saying that questions of race have never been nor could ever be manipulated to aid and abet misogyny. And while I have no interest in denying that Western nations “continue to mobilize racism in aid of all manner of more or less harebrained and murderous histories” (Mbembe 2019: 61), I do believe that all hetero-patriarchal cultures everywhere in the world share histories that are harebrainedly, homophobically, and misogynistically murderous. And so, to try to fail better at ending this lesson, and to try to provide a stronger bridge to our next one—which concerns feminism, gender studies, and queer theory—I will turn abruptly to another name, to different words, to recent writing by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Without further ado—and without addressing the disappointingly transphobic ways she’s given utterance to herself elsewhere38—I’ll let the last words of her 2015 book We Should All Be Feminists stand as the final words of the new Lesson Nine: My great-grandmother, from stories I’ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man she did not want to marry and married the man of her choice. She refused, protested, spoke up whenever she felt she was being deprived of land and access because she was female. She did not know that word feminist. But it doesn’t mean she wasn’t one. More of us should reclaim that word. The best feminist I know is my brother Kene, who is also a kind, good-looking, and very masculine young man. My own definition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, “Yes, there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better.” All of us, men and women, must do better. (47–8)

38

See Gutterman (2021) for details. Here let’s just say that, from a trans-affirmative perspective, Adichie herself is yet another one of “all of us” who really needs to “do better.”

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Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Nine: différance, deconstruction, binary opposition, speech/writing, reception theory/reader response, project of modernity, metanarrative, simulacrum, parody/pastiche, mass/popular culture, Frankfurt/ Birmingham Schools, globalization, cultural studies, Orientalism, subaltern, hybridity, liminality, sovereignty, biopower

Lesson Ten

“One is not born a woman” —on making the world queerer than ever

I: My (still male feminist) credo In her feminist landmark The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir asserts that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1949/2011: 283). One might think that Beauvoir’s claim, first issued over seventy years ago, would be relatively uncontroversial—at least among educated adults performing something like intellectual work in the public sphere—today. If, that is, one has managed to grasp, as per our early lessons, that human reality must be made to mean, and that our species’ prematurity at birth necessitates that no little animal at the mercy of language is ever born already fully humanized, much less “essentially” gendered, then the question of whether or not one “agrees” with Beauvoir’s base-line observation is pretty much a no-brainer. Or if one has grasped Lacan’s argument that “Woman does not exist” (1975/1998: 7)—that women exist but that “Woman” is a product of male fantasy, a symptom of what Roland Barthes calls “this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man” (1957/1985: 75)—then one should be able to recognize that a newly born human female hasn’t quite yet “lived up” to the coercive expectations of patriarchal fantasy or gotten very far in “the process of assuming, taking on, identifying with the positionalities and meaning effects specified by a particular society’s gender system” (De Lauretis 1994: 302). One might well imagine a female infant’s “womanly” potential, but as our old pal Hegel puts it, “when we want to see an oak . . . we are not satisfied to be shown an acorn instead” (1807/1977: 7). Or one might point out that if “woman” is our standard English term for an adult human female, then to consider a newly born human female as a grown-ass woman, to purport that any person can be born as a fully grown adult, is preposterous, in the old putting-the-cart-beforethe-horse sense of that word. And yet “preposterous” is exactly the word one adult female uses to describe Simone de Beauvoir’s most famous claim. In her review of the latest 265

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translation of The Second Sex in The New York Times Book Review, a woman named Francine du Plessix Gray calls Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman” a “preposterous assertion” which—get ready—“will be denied by any mother who has seen her toddler son eagerly grab for a toy in the shape of a vehicle or a gun, while at the same time showing a total lack of interest in his sister’s cherished dolls” (2010: 7)—as if any and all mothers everywhere in all of human history had beheld nothing else but this particular (and particularly modern and Western) scenario of playtime preferences; as if all fort-da games ever played, all eager grabbing or bored letting go of manufactured commodities on the part of our littlest animals, were always attributable only to their innate and unmanufactured “natures,” not to those protocols of “nurture” or socialization from which no human playtime has ever been immune; or as if no “nurturing” mother had ever done her duty to the reality principles of patriarchy by actively discouraging a toddling son’s interest in any dolls other than “G.I. Joe” or male Marvel Comics action figures or by vigilantly squelching a barely ambulant daughter’s desire, as expressed through the available playthings, to one day drive a car or shoot a gun or use a tool or write a book or change the world, her desire to be something other than a cherished doll, plaything, or trophy herself, to do something other with herself, with her life, if she chooses, than make and take care of those little living dolls called babies. And of course there’s a point—a certain logic and sagacious foresight—to this protective maternal discouragement. After all, there’s little point in letting little girls actively play with toy trucks in a society (such as until quite recently Saudi Arabia) where big girls can’t legally drive anyway. There’s little point in letting little girls actively play with their own clitorises in cultures where even those excessive “little toys” are one fine day to be taken away from them, so that they might become marriageable young women, the toys and/or tools of men.1 There’s little point in letting a little girl even pretend to be literate or educated, to read or to write, in settings such as Pakistan or Afghanistan, where, reportedly, a little girl can get acid thrown in her face on her way to school as Taliban-style punishment for the “obscenity” of being a little girl on

1

I’m not bringing up the FGC issue to rail, from my hegemonically Western perspective, against the “barbarity” of the continuing practice. Rather, I’m suggesting that if a particular human being is born with a “feature” (like a clitoris) that must be ritually excised for that person to be fitted into a local definition of femininity or womanhood, then Beauvoir’s base-line observation remains a no-brainer for any feminist analysis and not “preposterous” at all. For more discussion of FGC, see Zakaria (2021), Nolen (2022), and the footnote unpacking “globalization” in Lesson Nine.

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her way to school.2 Maybe there’s little point in allowing a little American girl to pretend to be interested in math and science—to play with a toy microscope or a real calculator—in a culture where male presidents of prestigious universities casually attribute the relative scarcity of women in the highest echelons of scientific research to “innate” differences in men’s and women’s cognitive dispositions.3 Or, as Virginia Woolf suggests with her hypothetical account of “Shakespeare’s sister” in her feminist landmark A Room of One’s 2

3

“Let this be a lesson”: “Acid,” reports Declan Walsh, “is the preferred weapon of vindictive men against women accused of disloyalty or disobedience. Common in several Asian countries, acid attacks in Pakistan grew sharply in number in 2011, to 150 from 65 in 2010, although some advocacy workers said the increase stemmed largely from better reporting” (The New York Times April 10, 2012: A1). Although acid may be the “preferred weapon” of such men against women and girls, bullets can also produce the desired effect, for as Walsh more recently reports from Karachi, Pakistan: “At the age of 11, Malala Yousafzi took on the Taliban by giving voice to her dreams. As turbaned fighters swept through her town in northwestern Pakistan in 2009, the tiny schoolgirl spoke out about her passion for education—she wanted to become a doctor—and became a symbol of defiance against Taliban subjugation. On Tuesday [October 9, 2012], masked Taliban gunmen answered Ms. Yousafzai’s courage with bullets, singling out the 14-year old on a bus filled with terrified schoolchildren, then shooting her in the head and neck . . . Doctors said that Ms. Yousafzai was in critical condition at a hospital near Peshawar, with a bullet possibly lodged close to her brain. A Taliban spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan, confirmed by phone that Ms. Yousafzai had been the target, calling her crusade for education rights an ‘obscenity.’ ‘She has become a symbol of Western culture in the area; she was openly propagating it,’ Mr. Ehsan said, adding that if she survived, the militants would certainly try to kill her again. ‘Let this be a lesson.’ ” (The New York Times October 10, 2012: A1). Update: Malala Yousafzai (according to Wikipedia) went on to publish a book called I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban in 2013, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, and graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2020. Ehsanullah Ehsan (says Wikipedia) remains active in the Taliban, though it’s unclear if he’s still interested in killing Malala. As for the Taliban, this faction gained control of Afghanistan shortly after the withdrawal of all American military forces in 2021, closed all the schools for girls that the Americans had opened, pledged to re-open those schools, then reneged on the pledge (see Padshah and Goldbaum, 2022). As for the Talibanish perception of activism towards women’s rights as a Western-inspired “obscenity,” see Zia ur-Rehman, “Women’s Marches in Pakistan Alarm Conservatives,” The New York Times March 7, 2022, A10: “Women planning to join the Aurat Marches, as they are called—Urdu for ‘women’s march’—have faced countless threats of murder and rape, along with accusations that they receive Western funding as part of a plot to promote obscenity in Pakistan. [. . .] The Pakistani Taliban have ominously warned the marchers to ‘fix their ways.’ ” I refer to comments made in 2005 by Lawrence Summers, then president of that great “symbol of Western culture” called Harvard University. And yes, following Walter Benjamin’s “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (1950/1968:256), I am “wildly” suggesting a line of continuity between the Taliban’s barbaric assaults against women and girls in Afghanistan and Summers’ more civilized but still discouraging words in Cambridge, Massachusetts, taking both the actions and the words as documents of patriarchy as a global structure in dominance, as indications, to quote Virginia Woolf quoting Lady Stephen, of “how few people really wish women to be educated” (1929/2005: 20n1) even now.

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Own, there would be little point for “a woman in Shakespeare’s day” to have had Shakespeare’s gifts as a writer, his “natural” and “innate” talent or genius, for “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at” (1929/2005: 48, 49). One fears that these elementary tutorials in what Toril Moi calls “sexual/ textual politics” are lost on the likes of Francine du Plessix Gray, or on anyone who would mockingly call Beauvoir’s claim that one is not born a woman “preposterous” and then trot out the playpen observations of “any” old ahistorical “mother” as airtight evidence supporting the charge. Gray, to be fair, also maintains that Beauvoir’s claim has been “disputed by certain feminist scholars, who would argue that many gender differences are innate rather than acquired” (2010: 7)—but she doesn’t bother telling us who these “certain” feminist scholars are, nor upon what empirical research they base their certainties, nor upon what theoretical premises they base their claims to being feminist.4 Of course, one is not born, but rather becomes, a feminist—or maybe one doesn’t. But what does it mean for any one of us to become not “a woman” or a feminist activist but an actively feminist theoretical writer? What follows here in answer to this question is, in warped imitation of Cleanth Brooks, a sort of “My Credo” regarding what feminist theorizing “means to me.”5 But first, given that it’s a more or less cis-gendered male “me” holding forth here, given that I was not born female and have thus far completely failed to become a woman, let’s stipulate that one need not be nor become nor ever have been a woman to engage in feminist theorizing, to call oneself a feminist, or to concur with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s claim that we should all be feminists (and that

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As it turns out, it was not Gray but Judith Thurman who in her introduction to the new translation cited (without actually naming) the “feminist scholars” in question. Thurman writes that Beauvoir’s “single most famous assertion—‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman”—has been disputed by more recent feminist scholars, and a substantial body of research in biology and the social sciences supports their argument that some sexual differences (besides the obvious ones) are innate rather than ‘situational.’ Instead of rejecting ‘otherness’ as an imposed cultural construct, women, in their opinion, should cultivate it as a source of self-knowledge and expression, and use it as the basis to critique patriarchal institutions” (2010: xv). OK, fine, but again: who are these scholars? Where are these arguments and the substantial research upon which they are based published? Thurman doesn’t care to share. In the first edition of this book I devoted a good bit of Lesson Seven to a critique of a piece called “My Credo” written by the old “New Critic” Cleanth Brooks, very much a formalist, anything but a feminist. I scratched the critique of Brooks from the second edition, so the irony of my using his “credo” to articulate mine needs to be explained.

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we all need to do a better job of it).6 Conversely, one need not be a woman who was once a man to think, as I do, that there’s something “rotten” (to employ Achille Mbembe’s word) about so-called Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism.7 Further, let’s observe the obvious point that simply being biologically female doesn’t guarantee anybody’s feminist bona fides. Moreover, let’s emphasize the second word in the phrase feminist theorizing to indicate that not all theorizing is informed by feminism any more than all feminism is demonstrably “theoretically aware” (Moi 1985: 61). Of course, one is never born “theoretically aware,” either. But I believe that to become theoretically aware as a feminist, and to become responsibly feminist as a theorist, it couldn’t hurt a writer to consider a few (humbly suggested) critical ground rules. Thus, as per my credo, and to further warp the words of Cleanth Brooks,“here are some articles of faith I could subscribe to” (1952/2007: 798). I believe that, to become a feminist theorist, one should learn: (1): To become relentlessly anti-essentialist, except maybe when it’s “strategically” productive not to be.

As Diana Fuss explains, essentialism in general philosophical terms involves “belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties which define the ‘whatness’ of a given entity,” while essentialism in the cognitive domain of sex and gender involves “the idea that men and women . . . are identified as such on the basis of transhistorical, eternal, immutable essences.” While theory in general is “anti-essentialist” in that it rejects “any attempts to naturalize human nature” (Fuss 1989: xi), feminist theory is particularly antiessentialist in that it rejects any attempts to naturalize and thereby eternalize

6

7

See the quote from Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists that concludes Lesson Nine. For discussions of the problems and possibilities of men and/in feminism, see Thomas (2002) and (2007). Anti-trans politics makes for some strange bedfellows. See Gutterman (2021) for an account of Adichie’s alliance with TERF icon J.K. Rowling. Then see Boylan (2022) for an account of how Rowling’s oft-articulated hostility to transgender (from an ostensibly feminist position) has garnered her an awkward alliance with and admiration from antiPussy Riot autocrat-gone-wild Vladimir Putin (whose forces at the time of this writing are still laying waste to and committing war crimes in Ukraine). Boylan writes: “What the two really have in common is what seems to be an antipathy to transgender people. Ms. Rowling, who has repeatedly protested that she supports trans rights, has nevertheless accused the trans rights movement of ‘doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode “woman” as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.’ Why she has chosen to use her enormous influence to pick on some of the most vulnerable people in the world is hard for me to fathom. But then, if you’re a member of a vulnerable population, being misunderstood by the powerful, and bearing the consequences of that ignorance, is an all-too-common experience” (np).

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historical social inequalities and asymmetries of power in the “lived experience” of sex and gender.8 Feminist theoretical writers assume that human sex and gender are never essential facts of nature but are only ever materialized in the socio-symbolic, in the social realm of signs, and signs, as you’ll recall from our lesson on structuralism, “do not have essences but are defined by a network of relations” (Culler 1975: 4). Hence, for feminist theory, neither “woman” nor “man” can ever be “essentially natural” identities; gender itself can never be anything other than “a socially imposed division of the sexes” (Rubin 1975/2007: 1675), “a social category imposed upon a sexed body” (Scott 1988: 32), “an obligatory injunction for the body to become a cultural sign” (Butler 1990: 179; Adventures: 244), all of which entails that no “body that matters” can ever have or express a “gender identity” and/or a “sexuality” except by virtue of signifying practices. But as Gayle Rubin points out in her landmark feminist text “The Traffic in Women,” all significant “expressions” of gender constitutively involve suppressions, repressions, and oppressions that are anything but naturally ordained: Far from being an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the suppression of natural similarities. It requires repression: in men, of whatever is the local version of “feminine” traits; in women, of the local definition of “masculine” traits. The division of the sexes has the effect of repressing some of the personality characteristics of virtually everyone, men and women. The same social system which oppresses women in its relations of exchange, oppresses everyone in its insistence upon a rigid division of personality. (1975/2007: 1675; Adventures 149)

For Judith Butler, however, this insistence on rigid sexual division works itself out, or fails to do so, not through “expression” as normally understood but rather via performativeness or performativity. Indeed, for Butler, who in the 1990s became anti-essentialism’s most prominent feminist champion, 8

In the chapter of her Teaching to Transgress called “Essentialism and Experience,” bell hooks takes Fuss to task for insufficiently attacking the essentialisms perpetuated by dominant groups and instead criticizing scholars and students from marginalized groups for investing too heavily in an “authority of experience” tethered to an ever-essentialist “identity politics” (a term I’ll be unpacking anon). She writes that “Fuss does not aggressively suggest that dominant groups—men, white people, heterosexuals— perpetuate essentialism. In her narrative it is always some marginalized ‘other’ who is essentialist” (1994: 81). Worse, hooks avers that Fuss’s “cavalier treatment” of black feminist critics in Essentially Speaking reminds her “of the way the tokenism of black women in feminist scholarship . . . takes on dehumanizing forms. Black women are treated as though we are a box of chocolate presented to individual white women for their eating pleasure, so they can decide for themselves and others which pieces are most tasty” (1994: 79–80).

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“the distinction between expression and performativeness is crucial” (1990: 192; Adventures 246). To understand this crucial distinction, however, we should first “distinguish ‘the performative’ in the linguistic sense from ‘performance’ as public exhibition.” We should then observe that “speech-act theorist J.L. Austin distinguishes performative utterances, which ‘perform the action they describe,’ from constantive utterances, which ‘describe a state of affairs and may be true or false’ ” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 222). In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler subversively applies the idea of the linguistic performative to articulations of identity, arguing that outright “expressions” or declarations of identity—such as “I am a straight white man”—can never be constative utterances, merely describing some already existing gendered, sexed, and raced “self,” but are rather utterly performative, actually bringing into relatively fragile social existence that which they purport to describe (in “my” case, straight white manliness). In Butler’s account, I never substantially am a straight white man; I only ever performatively repeat—and with no small amount of flop sweat— an approximation of a culturally produced ideal of straight white manliness, an ideal that is itself always only a copy for which there was never any “true original.” For Butler, “gender is performative,” by which she means that no gender is “expressed” by actions, gestures, or speech, but that the performance of gender produces retroactively the illusion that there is an inner gender core. That is, the performance of gender retroactively produces the effect of some true or abiding feminine [or masculine] essence or disposition so that one cannot use an expressive model for thinking about gender . . . Gender is produced as a ritualized repetition of conventions, . . . [a] ritual [that] is socially compelled in part by the force of a compulsory heterosexuality.9 (1997: 144)

But with her analysis of “drag” or “female impersonation” as a deconstructive imitation of a purportedly “true gender” which is itself only ever an imitation, Butler in ways collapses the distinction between the linguistic performative and “performativity” in the sense of public exhibition. When a man is performing drag as a woman, the “imitation” that drag is said to be is taken as an “imitation” of femininity, but the “femininity” that he imitates is not [ordinarily] understood as being itself an imitation. Yet if 9

Compulsory heterosexuality is a term used by Adrienne Rich (1980) “to suggest that heterosexuality, though commonly understood as a natural and personal ‘preference,’ is actually shaped and imposed upon women by society” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 53).

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one considers that gender is acquired, that it is assumed in relation to ideals which are never quite inhabited by anyone, then femininity is an ideal which everyone always and only “imitates.” Thus, drag imitates the imitative structure of gender, revealing gender itself to be an imitation. (1997: 145)

For Butler, in other words, when it comes to gender, it’s all drag all the time, not only “when a man is performing drag as a woman,” but whenever “a man is” or “a woman is”—period. Given the imitative structure of all gender, whenever a man is, whenever a man’s a man, that man is only ever “caught in the act” of male impersonation, performing drag as a man, so that “a man is” is not a constative utterance (any more than, say, crossing one’s legs in a specific manner while sitting is the “natural expression” of some stupid “inner gender core”). Given gender’s imitative structure, there’s never any real difference between being a man or a woman and acting like a woman or a man, whether we men and/or women like it or not. And in fact Butler’s performative theories are not to everyone’s liking. Some see her work as symptomatic of a baleful move within the academy from a specifically feminist focus on “women’s studies” to an overly general “gender studies” or to a not always discernibly feminist “queer theory” (both moves facilitating yet more discussion from, about, and between men, not infrequently to the exclusion of women). Others, such as Joan Copjec (1994), Slavoj Žižek (1999/2008), Tim Dean (2000), and yours truly (2008), have problems with Butler’s take on Lacan. Still others attack Butler for being too “theoretical” and hence insufficiently “political,” if not actually immoral, some even going so far as to assert that Judith Butler—brace yourself here— “collaborates with evil.” In her assault on Butler in the pages of The New Republic, Martha C. Nussbaum pillories the woman she calls “The Professor of Parody,” rips into this evil academic’s “hip quietism,” and rather noisily proclaims that “Hungry women are not fed by this, battered women are not sheltered by it, raped women do not find justice in it”—with “this” and “it” here standing for the seemingly “cheerful” but actually cynically debilitating “Butlerian enterprise” of highfalutin theory. “Feminism,” says Nussbaum, “demands more and women deserve better” (1999: 45) than Butler’s “fancy words on paper” (1999: 37). Of course, Nussbaum is technically quite correct: hungry women are not fed, etc., by consuming the theoretical works of Judith Butler. But then one might wonder exactly how the hungry, battered, and raped women of the world are substantially assisted or protected by moralistic attacks on the evil Judith Butler published in the pages of The New Republic.10 10

And I half-seriously wonder how many members of the goon-squad who attacked Butler in Brazil (see the first footnote in the Preface for details) were readers of The New Republic.

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On the other hand, Nussbaum’s unfancy if not puritanical “words on paper” allow us to consider more seriously the question of whether feminist anti-essentialism enables or disables political action or agency on the part or behalf of women. Feminism, after all, is necessarily, even essentially, a political project: it must be about change. It must involve Adichie’s recognition that “there’s a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it” (2015: 48). And so some might wonder what in the world “anti-essentialism” ever really changes, what it fixes or repairs, what politically “emancipatory effects” really follow from buddying up with Butler at theoretical drag bars or lolling around with Denise Riley examining the moniker “Woman” and forever asking Am I that Name? (1993). How does all this essence-less inquiry really help get anything politically progressive accomplished for women as an “identitarian grouping” (Bahri 2004: 209) of oppressed human beings? If in our desire to avoid “essentializing” we become reluctant to say what or even that “a woman” truly is, basing our reluctance on the deconstructive imperative to refuse “the authority or determining power of every ‘is’ ” (Lucy 2004: 11) that there is, then how can “we” claim that “she” is truly oppressed (hungry, held down, battered, raped) or ever really fight against her oppression? Now, the political aim of “theoretically aware” anti-essentialist feminism is to resist patriarchal oppression by refusing to fix meaning—specifically, by subverting any and all “biologically determined” or “naturalized” meanings of the word “woman.” But (if I can begin to tap into some critically queer resources here) there’s also a sort of anti-metaphysical ethic of non-violence involved in proliferating the term “woman” in the same destabilizing way that some queer theorists proffer “queer” as “an identity without an essence” (Halperin 1995: 62). Just as poststructuralists and postmodernists follow Nietzsche in questioning the value of “truth,” this queerly anti-identitarian ethic radically questions the value of “the self,” even if the “self ” in question is the vaunted experiential self of identity politics. For as Leo Bersani argues, “the sacrosanct value of selfhood accounts for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements.” The self, writes Bersani, is actually no more than “a practical convenience,” a way to get things done; but when “promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence” (1994: 4), a way to get folks killed. To avoid sanctioning violence, particularly violence against “the other,” one must learn take oneself ironically: the ethically ironic trick that one must play or perform on oneself involves utilizing “the self ” only as a “practical convenience”—not as an essential truth or locus of absolute authenticity but rather as a strategic fiction, and always without taking

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identity or identity-statements (or identity politics) seriously enough ever to kill or die for.11 Even though the queer theorist Bersani and the Marxist feminist deconstructive postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak aren’t exactly addressing the same set of problems, perhaps Bersani’s ethically ironic stance towards “the self ” can be productively related to what Spivak calls strategic essentialism in relation to “the group.” For the principle trick of strategic essentialism would be to remain theoretically anti-identitarian while mobilizing as much essentialist identity as is practically necessary to form a politically effective identitarian grouping. As Deepika Bahri explains, Spivak considers it possible for feminists to avoid the pitfalls of biological determinism or formulaic fixity while continuing to use essentialism in a self-conscious and meditated fashion. Spivak describes the tactical and deliberate use of essentialist typology as “strategic essentialism”: “a strategic use of positivistic essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (1996: 214). Although it is undesirable to accept any positivistic or deterministic notion of identity, Spivak nevertheless allows for its contingent use in a specific and welldefined context for the work being undertaken. (2004: 209)

Whether anti-essentialist or strategically essentialist, however, feminist theorists, as feminist theorists, all recognize that there is a great deal of political work still to be undertaken. Even if they grant the possibility of “performative interpretation, that is, of an interpretation that transforms the very thing that it interprets” (Derrida 1994: 51), feminist theorists still understand that revolutionary change in human sexual relations isn’t going to happen simply on Judith Butler’s or Gayatri Spivak’s interpretive say-so. But as feminist theorists, most also take to heart Donna Haraway’s postmodernist caution that even “the feminist dream of a common language,

11

The phrase identity politics is used in contemporary critical debates to capture “the sense of identity offered by one’s membership in groups that have suffered oppression on the basis of gender, race, class, or sexual preference” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 148). As bell hooks puts it, “identity politics emerges out of the struggles of oppressed or exploited groups to have a standpoint on which to critique dominant structures, a position that gives purpose and meaning to struggle” (1994: 88–9). But “identity politics” can also emerge out of the efforts of oppressive and exploitative groups to have a standpoint from which to preserve and maintain dominant structures, a position that tries to give a “universal” and “transcendent” purpose and meaning to their maintenance. For recent discussions of the tensions between various universalisms and mutually exclusive forms of identity politics, see Menon (2015); the chapter called “The Posthumanist Universal” in Ruti (2018b); and McGowan (2020).

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like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one” (1985/2008: 342, my emphasis). At the very minimum, and unlike Gray’s purportedly “feminist scholars,” feminist theorists tend to acknowledge that human sex and gender are performative to the marrow—bodily matters, perhaps, but matters of cultural signification nonetheless, always in excess of “the bare choreographies of procreation” (Sedgwick 1990: 29) or the “bare bones” of chromosomal variation. In this interpretation, even if there do turn out to be empirically provable “innate” differences between human males and females, there will still be “no natural way for us to be” men or women “and no species requirements that can exhaustively determine the principles in light of which we act” (Hägglund 2020:177)—that is to say, we’re still going to have to talk about what these differences mean and what, if anything, we want to do about them in relation to the question of what sort of world we want to live in. Yes, like non-human animals, human males and females are indeed made of flesh and blood and X and Y chromosomes and the like, but, unlike non-human animals, “women” and “men” are made of signs, which neither have essences nor grow on trees nor fall from the sky. And the fact that the signs of gender have been to some extent denaturalized and demystified and de-deified by feminist theory leads me to my credo’s next article of faith; to wit, that to become feminist in one’s theorizing and theoretically aware in one’s feminism one should always try— (2): To keep the faith secular and stay vigilantly anti-theological: no gods (or goddesses), no masters—no exceptions.

“Man,” says Marx, “makes religion” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures 15), but, being a man, he forgot to add: “in order to maintain systemic male dominance.” For just as there’s no document of civilization that doesn’t also document barbarism, there are no “world religions” to date that haven’t been concocted by men to serve patriarchal, anti-egalitarian, anti-feminist purposes. This “radical atheist” observation—which should be obvious to anyone who’s not a religious adherent (to the cause of male dominance)—isn’t nullified by the fact that certain people consider themselves “feminist” but nonetheless remain tethered to some patriarchal religious institution or another, no doubt in hopes of “reforming” it, inserting a few tokens of female authority into the overarching structure of male dominance but basically leaving that structure ideologically intact, i.e., with some phallic father-figure or another fixed at the fantasized center or saturating the universe as some super-sympathetic theological “process.” I confess that my own merely human powers of sympathy are strained by these remarkable (but not miraculous) powers of

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adherence, and that—particularly after reading Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom—I quite frankly see no politically progressive or intellectually persuasive way to reconcile feminist theory with any of the available andro-monotono-theisms (including “process theology”). In other words: sorry, boys and girls, but if we want to grow up to become real-world feminist theorists (not to mention fully democratic socialists), then we’ve got to get over “God,” even if we can’t get rid of grammar.12 Well, I’m afraid that I’ve just alluded to Friedrich Nietzsche yet again, specifically to his dig at the “pitiable God of Christian monotono-theism” (1888b/2006: 491) and to his fear “that we are not getting rid of [this] God because we still believe in grammar” (1888/2006a: 464). My allusions aren’t completely inappropriate to a discussion of gender, however, for the immediately preceding sentence in Twilight of the Idols reads: “ ‘Reason’ in language: oh what a deceitful old woman!”—by which quip Nietzsche, according to his editors, isn’t simply being ageist and misogynist (though he’s of course being both ageist and misogynist) but rather “exploiting the fact that the grammatical gender of the word for reason in German (die Vernunft) is feminine” (Pearson and Large 2006: 464n21). We’ll come back to this matter of gender and grammar anon. Here let’s tarry with Nietzsche’s point about God and grammar, or “Reason in language.” Let’s observe that every grammatically correct and completely predicated sentence must include a subject and a verb, a subject which is the legible cause of the action that the sentence effectively describes. Nietzsche suggests, however, that this arbitrary grammatical rule is the unacknowledged legislator of the “reasonable” philosophical assumption that any effect must 12

This position puts me at odds with the turn Susan Hekman takes at the end of her chapter on “Subject” in the Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory. Hekman writes that “Rejecting feminist theology as an oxymoron stands in the way of our common goal: redefining the human. And the benefits of working together are significant. As the process theologians have emphasized, a conception of God as in-the-world displaces the androcentrism of the tradition. A God who is present in every moment of experience and sympathetic to our humanity changes everything for women and men and offers us a new way of being human” (2019: 29). I’m of course all for changing everything, but can’t we redefine ourselves and find new ways of being human without having to imagine this superhumanly sympathetic higher power? Hägglund thinks that we can, and he writes that our real emancipation involves removing “all remaining forms of political theology by removing any appeal to ‘God’ in favor of the explicit democratic recognition that what ultimately matters is our relation to one another. [. . .] At the end of the day, all forms of political theology are antidemocratic, since they assume that we must defer to a higher authority than we the people in order to hold together as a community. The movement toward democratic socialism is thus inseparable from the overcoming of political theology and the withering away of religious faith. We will recognize that our finitude is inseparable from our dignity and our care for one another. We will acknowledge that everything depends on we the people” (2020: 388–9).

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have a cause and for the “reasonable” theological assumption that any creation must have a creator. In sum, Nietzsche here ascribes sublime theological belief to mere grammatical prejudice. Of course, this ascription doesn’t mean that a prescriptive grammarian can’t be a howling atheist, any more than my claim that a feminist theorist must be “anti-theological” turns every hardcore atheist into a radical feminist (witness the case of American comedian Bill Maher). Nietzsche’s writing does, however, suggest that “getting rid of God” remains a problem of writing, a problem of authority, for all animals at the mercy of language, but particularly for we scribbling (or keyboarding) animals who are bent on “liberating ourselves in language” (hooks 1994: 175, emphasis added for the sake of cadence). No coincidence, then, that the word “anti-theological” hails, as we’ve read, from Roland Barthes’ “The Death of the Author.” As you’ll recall, Barthes calls writing “an anti-theological activity” that basically bumps off “God and all his hypostases” by refusing “to fix meaning” (1968/1977: 147). But it isn’t just any old writing that “deicidally” refuses fixity. It certainly isn’t your typical “male writing” that refuses phallic divinity and declines to demonize feminine sexuality. It is, rather, “a new insurgent writing”—a “writing the body” or écriture feminine—that inscribes this explicitly feminist refusal to fix meaning. In her feminist landmark “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous writes: I mean it when I speak of male writing. I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now . . . writing has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening since it’s often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction; that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition . . ., where woman has never her turn to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. (1975/2007: 1646)

Writing of sexually opposed ways of writing, Cixous celebrates the writing called écriture feminine as “the very possibility of change,” and she describes its opposite, “male writing,” as repressive and mystifying fiction that works against change, that tries to keep all its meanings fixed. But here we might pause to ask: isn’t all this “writing the body” stuff borderline “essentialist”? Isn’t Cixous buying into biological determinism, writing as if any writing

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from any female body is inherently revolutionary while any male scripting remains innately phallogocentric scripture? On the one hand, Cixous is clearly and intentionally writing about “writing, from and toward women” (1975/2007: 1647): she is writing (from and toward) the female body, the masturbating, menstruating, maybe child-bearing (or maybe not—your choice, says Cixous), the literally and figuratively lactating body of “woman.” “There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk,” writes Cixous: “She writes in white ink” (1975/2007: 1647). “By writing her self, woman will return to the body . . . Write your self. Your body must be heard” (1975/2007: 1646), etc. On the other hand, Cixous doesn’t count all writing by any female as automatically écriture feminine by a long shot. Nor does she think that all male bodies are biologically determined to just keep pumping out the custard of phallogocentric script. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” she notes “inscriptions of femininity” in the work of “Colette, Marguerite Duras . . . and Jean Genet” (1975/2007: 1646n4), while elsewhere she writes extensively on feminine inscription in her Exile of James Joyce (1968/1980). Despite, then, certain menstrual and milky appearances, there’s ultimately nothing biologically essentialist about Cixous’ écriture feminine (in other words, she gets metaphor: she understands that the word “milk” isn’t really milk, that word “menses” isn’t actually bloody, that the word “real” isn’t the real, etc.). I would also suggest that there’s nothing theologically essentialist about écriture feminine either, for Cixous’ Medusa, though obviously a conscientiously un-demonized figure of mythic resistance, isn’t exactly “a goddess.” And neither is Donna Haraway’s socialist-feminist sci-fi cyborg.13 For at the end of her landmark “Manifesto for Cyborgs,” having pretty much pulled the plug on certain naturalizing, techno-phobic, and residually religious forms of feminist discourse, Haraway flat-out claims that she “would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (1985/2008: 349). And to my atheist ear, Haraway also begins the essay on a nicely anti-theological note, calling her manifesto “an effort to build an ironic myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” and then following with this irreligious (and ungrammatical)

13

“A contraction of ‘cybernetic organism’, a cyborg is any self-organizing system which combines organic and mechanical parts . . . The word was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in their 1960 Astronautics article ‘Cyborgs and Space’ . . . However, critical theory did not explore the implications of the cyborg until the American socialistfeminist Donna Haraway wrote her seminal ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). Haraway reinscribed the cyborg as a political and theoretical idea which could disrupt conventional binary oppositions, such as human/animal and organism/machine. Because the cyborg is a hybrid or mixture, it suggests an alternative to unifying, homogeneous concepts, such as ‘Woman’ ” (Malpas and Wake 2006: 166).

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fragment: “Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification” (1985/2008: 324). She goes on to call her essay an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction . . . an effort to contribute to socialistfeminist culture and theory in a post-modernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. (1985/2008: 325)

Haraway’s non-salvational cyborg is a “cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.” And yet it pleases Haraway to confuse the boundary between social reality and fiction, even science fiction, for “Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (1985/2008: 324). What links Haraway’s poly-sci-fi cyborg to Cixous’ laughing Medusa to Barthes’ anti-theological “scriptor,” and perhaps even to Nietzsche’s ecstatically overflowing Dionysus, is this happy blasphemy against identity, this ironic belief in human reality as world-changing fiction, in writing as “the very possibility of change” in and of a world that must be made to mean. And yet, as much pleasure as we might take in the confusion of boundaries, we must, as Haraway observes, also take responsibility for their construction. Thus, as every good boy and girl must tirelessly point out, not everybody in the world has the luxury of reading fiction or writing the body or proliferating sexy theory. And this point leads to my penultimate article of faith, which is that to become feminist in one’s theorizing, one must: (3): Become relentlessly “anti-universalizing” in one’s critical endeavors, except when to do so risks disabling one’s critical endeavors.

With apologies to Cixous, we do have to observe that a good bit of the “ink” spilled in the name of feminist theory has been pretty damn “milky”— that is, Anglo-Eurocentrically “white”—and that anti-essentialist feminism has taken its share of hits from certain critical race and postcolonialist quarters. In Teaching to Transgress, for example, bell hooks writes that “the contemporary feminist call for sisterhood, the radical white woman’s appeal to black women and all women of color to join the feminist movement, is seen by many black women as yet another expression of white female denial of the reality of racist domination, of their complicity in the exploitation and oppression of black women and black people” (1994: 102). And in “Postmodern Blackness,” hooks describes the way she says

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black folks respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics by saying, “Yeah, it’s easy to give up identity, when you got one.” Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the “subject” when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time [?] (1989/2007: 2012)

Other examples of theoretical and political arguments against Eurocentric (and specifically French) feminism would include Gayatri Spivak’s effectively hanging Cixous and Julia Kristeva out to dry in “French Feminism in an International Frame” (1981); Sylvia Wynter’s demolition of Luce Irigaray’s “purely Western assumption of a universal category, ‘woman’ ” in the essay called “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings” (1990: 335); and, much more recently, Rafia Zakaria’s Against White Feminism, which doesn’t find Simone de Beauvoir’s “one is not born a woman” line “preposterous,” at least, but does contest the blanched view of Beauvoir as “timeless feminist heroine” and does assert that Beauvoir’s “belief in Western cultural supremacy and essentialization of the white woman as the model of all women became baked into the very epistemology of feminism.”14 But perhaps the most well-known postcolonialist critique of AngloEurocentric feminism (or at least the one that I’m perhaps unwisely still going to spar with here in the second edition of Ten Lessons) remains Chandra Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” which steadily argues against “a universalist theory of women’s oppression,” rightly insists “on the heterogeneity of the lives of ‘Third-World’ women,” and passionately “pleads for an inter-relational analysis that does not limit the definition of the female subject to gender and does not bypass

14

As we read in Lesson Nine, Achille Mbembe objects to what he calls a “certain rotten feminism” that “manipulat[es] questions of gender for racist ends” (2019: 61). And while I countered that it’s also possible to rally questions of race for anti-feminist purposes, I did NOT say that that’s what Mbembe is up to. I did not say that Achille Mbembe was displaying what I’d still better let bell hooks call “the blatant anti-feminism of many black male thinkers” (1994: 127). Writing about the impeccably anti-racist Sylvia Wynter, however, Natasha Barnes does contend that “Wynter’s conclusions lead to a repudiation of feminism as a site of emancipatory imagining” (1999: 41; cited in Goldberg 2004: 164n.57). My point here and in what follows (that is, my critique of Chandra Mohanty) is that while I’m not against, say, Against White Feminism per se, I remain concerned that some “thinkers” might use arguments “against white feminism” and against “hegemonic Western feminism” to impede any “feminist movement” whatsoever (“feminist movement”—minus the monolithically definite article “the”—being bell hooks’ preferred term for what she always wanted to see, describing not a singular and homogeneous “movement” but any type of motion that might be detected by a sufficiently sensitive radar system).

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the social, class, and ethnic co-ordinates of those analyzed” (Bahri 2004: 213). Mohanty writes that her project involves “deconstructing and dismantling” what she calls “hegemonic ‘Western’ feminisms” while “building and constructing” what she calls “autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies” (1991/2008: 381). Of course, at the time of its writing, Mohanty’s essay represented a sorely needed intervention into the overly universalizing, overly generalizing, blinkeredly ethnocentric, and, you bet, even rampantly racist tendencies of middle-class white Western feminisms.15 And Mohanty helpfully specifies that even in her non-Western woman’s eyes, “Western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogeneous in its goals, interests, or analyses” and that her reference “to ‘Western feminism’ is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith” (1991/2008: 381–2). But what seems problematic about Mohanty’s project—at least in this pale male feminist theorist’s eyes—is the way the project potentially “dismantles” not simply the “hegemonic Western-ness” but the operative feminism of “hegemonic ‘Western’ feminism,” the way its insistence on always historically contextualizing and culturally grounding feminist strategies could work to bring those very strategies crashing to the ground. If, on the one hand, Western feminist theory has been, as Mohanty rightly charges, often quite guilty of what Slavoj Žižek calls “over-rapid universalization,” which “produces a quasi-universal Image whose function is to make us blind to its historical, socio-symbolic determination,” then, on the other, Mohanty herself might be engaging in what Žižek calls “over-rapid historicization,” which “makes us blind to the real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations/symbolizations” (Žižek 1989: 50). And if the “real kernel which returns as the same” here is, simply put, the globally systematic oppression of women by men, then a searing critique of “a universalist theory of women’s oppression”—of the oppression, that is, of women everywhere by men everywhere—can end up effectively sparing men, acquitting us (and the socio-symbolic systems we construct and maintain in our own image) of the very charge of oppression, thus inadvertently endorsing patriarchal discourses and oppressive political practices. I’m not suggesting here that Mohanty intends to endorse male dominance (in fact I’m quite sure that she doesn’t) but rather that her over-rapid historicizations in the essay called “Under Western Eyes” might effectively blind her readers to what my (admittedly and inescapably) Western eyes nonetheless take to be the “real kernel.”

15

Mohanty discusses the time of the essay’s writing, some of the feminist responses to it, and her current thinking about it, in “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” (2003).

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For example, Mohanty writes that we must avoid universally casting “women as victims of male violence” and that “male violence” itself “must be theorized and interpreted within specific societies, in order both to understand it better and to effectively organize to change it” (1991/2008: 386–7); to more effectively organize towards change, says Mohanty, we must “theorize male violence within specific societal frameworks, rather than assume it as a universal fact” (1991/2008: 402). Now, on the one hand, as a subject supposed to be male, and hence supposedly supposed by Western feminism to be violent, I suppose I should be grateful for the presumption of innocence that Mohanty, in the interests of socio-historical specificity, here provides me and my likes, and I suppose I should take full advantage of the opportunity she affords me to claim myself as a non-violent exception to the ostensibly hard and fast feminist rule. I can also appreciate that her intention here is to rescue “Third World women” from their prescribed roles as victims of universal male violence, so as to afford these women greater political agency. On the other hand, this feminist man has to ask: are there any societies anywhere in which patriarchy, or systemic male dominance, isn’t still pretty much the lay of the land, in which female agency isn’t still at least something of a threat to the very idea of male authority/authority-as-male, and in which authoritarian male violence against women isn’t always a strong possibility, an assumed prerogative of “male identity,” if not a universal then at least a broadly pervasive fact? And if there aren’t any such societies, wouldn’t that absence suggest that “male violence against women” is a big honking part of what Žižek calls the “real kernel,” a legitimately “trans-societal” concern for any “strategically universalizing” feminist analysis?16 Mohanty apparently thinks not, for in her analysis it is not systemic male dominance but rather universalizing “Western feminist discourse” that “ultimately robs” Third World women “of their historical and political agency” (1991/2008: 398). Mohanty’s analysis could thus be read as effectively protecting (non-Western) patriarchy while handing “hegemonic Western feminism” an enormous amount of power over Third World women.

16

Cf. the “strategically universalizing” gesture in note 2 above, where I focus on a specifically “real kernel which returns as the same in diverse historicizations” by suggesting lines of continuity running back and forth between Afghanistan’s vicious Taliban, Harvard’s more genteel Lawrence Summers, and all those who really didn’t want women to be educated back in the days of Virginia Woolf ’s Lady Stephen. I would also make the “real kernel” claim that “rape culture” is rape culture wherever you go, whether the sexual assailants be horribly impoverished men in India or hideously wealthy men in America who produce Hollywood movies or ascend to presidencies or win life-time appointments to the Supreme Court.

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As for the “contextualization” upon which Mohanty insists: she writes that “while Indian women of different religions, castes, and classes might forge a political unity on the basis of organizing against police brutality toward women . . . an analysis of police brutality must be contextual.” But one wonders exactly which explanatory contextual details a feminist analyst really needs to know to “better understand” and better oppose such “complex realities” (1991/2008: 396) as misogynist police violence. One also wonders about this rhetorical shift from a general male violence, which would include domestic violence, to the specific question of “police brutality toward women”—one wonders, that is, if men in India who want to brutalize women and get away with it join the constabulary in the same way that white people in America who want to kill black people and get away with it become cops. My point is that while there can be little doubt that Mohanty both opposes and wants to render more “understandable” statist/misogynist/masculinist violence in India and elsewhere, there are times when the definitional line separating the “understandable” from the “justifiable” seems to get precariously thin—or, if that assessment seems unfair, let’s say that there are times when an overly-contextualized analysis of “complex realities” might blind us to the “real kernel” and effectively disable or “neutralize feminism’s capacity to advocate for gender equality” (Ruti 2018b: 47).17 One (male) feminist analyst of masculinity (and organizer against male violence) has written that “under patriarchy, the cultural norm of male identity consists in power, prestige, and prerogative as over and against the gender class women. That’s what masculinity is. It isn’t something else”

17

Mari Ruti speaks eloquently to these problems when she writes that “contemporary feminist theory often wavers in its defense of gender equality whenever it is forced to confront the complexities of tradition, culture, and custom: critics who have (rightly) spent decades condemning heteropatriarchy in Western contexts can sometimes become oddly apologetic of it when it takes place in non-Western contexts. The reason for this is obvious: Western (or Western-based) critics do not want to perpetuate imperialist agendas by imposing ‘Western’ ideals of equality and freedom on cultures that (supposedly) are not premised on these values. Yet the retreat from these values results in situations where so-called feminists are selling women down the river in order to defend—apologize for—cultural practices that are clearly heteropatriarchal; they end up siding with the male elites of non-Western societies rather than with those women (and men) who would like to see heteropatriarchy collapse. This is one of the biggest dilemmas of contemporary (transnational) feminism: ‘respect’ for tradition, culture, and custom has arguably neutralized feminism’s capacity to advocate for gender equality to the extent that it is sometimes hard to know where feminism ends and the apology for heteropatriarchy begins. Critiques of imperialism, racism, poverty, and other social inequalities are of course an essential part of contemporary feminism. But when these critiques override the critique of gender inequality out of reverence for cultural ‘particularity,’ it feels that other progressive agendas have become more urgent than feminism” (2018b: 47).

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(Stoltenberg 1974/2004: 41). And yet Mohanty often writes as if normative heteropatriarchal masculinity (at least in “the Third World”) really were “something else.” She rather astoundingly argues against the “universalizing” feminist theory in which “patriarchy is always necessarily male dominance” and in which “religious, legal, economic, and familial systems are implicitly assumed to be constructed by men” (1991/2008: 397). But again, this antitheological male feminist wants to know: who or what else does Mohanty think “constructed” these “systems”? God? Does she think they grew on trees or fell from the sky? If Mohanty demonstrably doesn’t want (us) to consider “male violence against women” as a universal problem, a “real kernel which returns as the same through diverse historicizations” (Žižek 1989: 50), or if she really doesn’t (want us to) see how “patriarchy” really has and still does equal systemic “male dominance” everywhere and always (even if not all men get to be on top, even if not all men are treated equally in or by this system, etc.), then her project, for all its welcomed anti-universalist use-value, arguably falls short of what I would consider the minimum requirements of radical feminist critique (which, in order to be radical—in Marx’s sense of “going to the roots”—should, in my view, neither arrogantly universalize nor over-hastily historicize). Moreover, if Mohanty really doesn’t think patriarchal “religious, legal, economic, and familial systems” are constructed by men (to serve the purposes of systemic male dominance), then her discourse falls short of what Said in Orientalism calls “Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, [and] that what they can know is what they have made” (1979: 4–5). Finally, particularly invested, as she seems to me, in denying that religious systems are “constructed by men” (she lets the adjective “religious” appear first on her list of systems), Mohanty seems to disregard Marx’s most basic historical materialist observations that “Man makes religion” and that the “criticism of religion is the prerequisite of all criticism” (1844/1978: 53; Adventures 15, my emphases). One suspects, in other words, that unlike Donna Haraway’s radically ironic cyborg myth, Mohanty’s sincere crusade against hegemonic Western feminist universalism may on some fundamental level be more “faithful” to religion, and hence to heteropatriarchy, than to “feminism, socialism, or materialism” (Haraway 1985/2008: 324). But look, I’m not a complete idiot: I’m fully aware of the fact that Gayatri Spivak has “famously described British intervention in the Sati [or wifeburning] practice in India as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ ” (Bahri 2004: 200; Spivak 1988: 297). And so I also understand quite well that my intervention into Mohanty’s criticisms of white feminism in “Under Western Eyes” opens me to charges of being just another privileged white guy attempting to save white women (and white theory) from a brown

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woman, charges of being nothing more at the end of the day than an identitarian masculinist posturing as a pro-feminist fighter, just another pale male all too eager to kick discursive ass in order to protect the seriousness of his own ethnocentrically and anti-religiously biased statements, statements—like “real feminism sees no use-value in religion,” to paraphrase what I’ve asserted above—that may have no real use-value for real-world feminists (particularly those living in social worlds where apostasy isn’t exactly a safe option and where any political activism at all can be a life-risking endeavor), articulations which may indicate that my most fundamental commitment is to Nietzschean godlessness (or to my own cleverness) rather than to feminism, postcolonial critique, anti-capitalist struggles, or even social justice. All I’ll say in response to these charges is that if I truly believe, as per Adichie, that “we should all be feminists,” and that the “emancipatory imagining” (Barnes 1999: 41) of social justice entails my attempting to read and write theory as a feminist, then if I discern what I take to be a potentially anti-feminist undercurrent in any writer’s otherwise sympathetic critique of feminist theory I feel duty-bound to point it out: a feminist man’s gotta do what a feminist man’s gotta do to expose over-hasty historicization and to try to keep all our eyes peeled for the “real kernel” of global systemic male dominance and transhistorical misogynist violence. But rather than attempting to further squirm out from under these charges, I will veer away from the problem of feminism’s ethnocentrism— from what Merve Emre calls “feminism’s historical complicity with empire and capital, its appalling insularity, and its deep-seated provinciality”—and turn instead to the issue of feminism’s heteronormativity.18 And this turn leads me to the end of “my credo” and to my last remaining “article of faith”: to wit, that in order to live up to its most radically and globally transformative

18

Emre’s words appear in her back-cover endorsement of Zakaria’s Against White Feminism. As for heteronormativity, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write that “by heteronormativity we mean the institutions, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality not only coherent—that is, organized as a sexuality—but privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms; unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—often unconscious, immanent to practice or institutions. Contexts that have little visible relation to sex practice, such as life narrative and generational identity, can be heteronormative in this sense, while in other contexts forms of sex between men and women might not be heteronormative. Heteronormativity is thus a concept distinct from heterosexuality” (1998/2007: 1722)

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promises, in order to keep writing (as) the very possibility of change, feminist theory must (4): Do its part to help “make the world queerer than ever.”

II: “The future is kid’s stuff ” In her other landmark intervention, called “Thinking Sex,” Gayle Rubin compares the analytical limitations of feminism to those of Marxism and concludes that “Feminism is no more capable than Marxism of being the ultimate and complete account of all social inequality.” She writes that “Marxism is probably the most supple and powerful conceptual system extant for analyzing social inequality” but that “attempts to make Marxism the sole explanatory system for all social inequalities have been dismal exercises.” While Marxism best confronts class antagonisms, Rubin writes, “Feminist conceptual tools were developed to detect and analyze genderbased hierarchies,” and “to the extent that these [hierarchies] overlap with erotic stratifications, feminist theory has some explanatory power.”19 But as the issues become less those of gender and more those of sexuality, feminist analysis becomes irrelevant and often misleading. Feminist thought simply lacks angles of vision which can encompass the social organization of sexuality. The criteria of relevance in feminist thought do not allow it to see or assess critical power relations in the area of sexuality. In the long run, feminism’s critique of gender hierarchy must be incorporated into a radical theory of sex, and the critique of sexual oppression should enrich feminism. But an autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality must be developed. (1984/2008: 314)

And in fact such a theory has been developed by various cultural and political analysts who see their work as not (only) Marxist and not (only) 19

We can best consider what Rubin means by erotic stratifications by considering the diagram she provides in “Thinking Sex” which charts the way heteronormativity separates “Good” sex from “Bad.” The “best” sex is “normal, natural, healthy, holy, heterosexual, married, monogamous, and reproductive” while the “worst” is “abnormal, unnatural, sick, sinful, ‘way out,’ ”—anything involving “transvestites, transsexuals, fetishists, sadomasochists,” and/or the exchange of money. The point of Rubin’s diagram is that “most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone. This notion of a single ideal sexuality characterizes most systems of thought about sex . . . including feminism and socialism” (1984/2008: 294).

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feminist but (also) queer.20 What is now commonly known as queer theory develops as a “critique of sexual oppression” qua social normativity: queer theory develops by distilling the lessons of Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and gay/ lesbian studies while at the same time distinguishing itself from those movements by exposing their investments in heteronormativity and/or identity politics. Queer theory advocates a “thorough resistance to regimes of the normal” and attempts to “make the world queerer than ever” (Warner 1993: xxvi, xxvii) through such anti-identitarian resistance. Thus, on the one hand, queer theory is interested in any and all acts, images, and ideas that “trouble,” violate, cross, mix, or otherwise confound established boundaries between male and female, normal and abnormal, self and other. In a limited sense, the goal is to create more space for and recognition of the various actions performed daily in a social landscape blinded and hostile to variety. But the broader goal is a general troubling, and an attempted unfixing, of the links between acts, categories, representations, desires, and identities. (Leitch et al. 2001: 2487)

On the other hand, queer theory views with postmodern skepticism the minoritizing conception of sexuality that undergirds gay liberation and women’s liberation (and hence academically institutionalized gay studies and women’s studies too) . . . Feminism and gay liberation based their claims for political participation and radical equality . . . on the foundation of identity . . . By contrast, queer theory and politics begin from a critique of identity and of identity politics, inspired primarily by Foucault’s analysis of

20

The word queer has appeared a number of times already in this book, but I’ve strategically deferred a specific gloss until now. Carla Freccero writes that the term queer, “as taken up by political movements and by the academy, has undergone myriad transformations and has been the object of heated definitional as well as political debates. . . . It is a term that [has] something to do with a critique of literary critical and historical presumptions of sexual and gender (hetero) normativity, in cultural contexts and in textual subjectivities. It also has something to do with the sexual identities and positionalities, as well as the subjectivities, that have come to be called lesbian, gay, and transgender, but also perverse and narcissistic—that is, queer. At times, queer continues to exploit its productive indeterminancy as a word used to designate that which is odd, strange, aslant; in this respect, . . . all textuality, when subjected to close reading, can be said to be queer” (2006: 5). For somewhat “historicizing” accounts of the emergence of the term “queer” in the academy, see Thomas (2000) and (2009).

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the disciplinary purposes that sexual identities so easily serve. (Dean 2000: 223)

Thus taking on what Berlant and Warner call the hard “labor of ambiguating categories of identity” (1995: 345), queer theorists offer up the fighting words “queer” and “queerness” as differing from not only “straight” and “straightness” but from gay, lesbian, etc., insofar as these terms function as clear markers of sexual identity. For “queer” is “less an identity than a critique of identity . . . a site of permanent becoming” (Jagose 1996: 131). “Queerness” involves “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning where the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993: 8). For “queer,” writes David Halperin, “is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence” (1995: 62). “Queerness,” writes Lee Edelman, “can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.” Queerness is “what chafes against ‘normalization,’ ” what “deliberately sever[s] us from ourselves, from the assurance, that is, of knowing ourselves” (2004: 17, 6, 5). Queerness is thus “obviously threatening and infallibly dreaded by everything within us that desires a kingdom” (Derrida 1967/1982: 22; Adventures: 124), everything within us that desires a fixed and knowable identity. I hope that you will recognize not only that but why I just swapped the word “queerness” for Derrida’s dreaded différance. And I hope that you will understand both that and why différance, like queer, is one of those troubling words that troubles “is” itself, that, once again, “begins . . . from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every ‘is’ ” (Lucy 2004: 12) that there is. In this authoritarian and identitarian sense, “is” is (or wants to be) its own kingdom. But “there is no kingdom of différance” (Derrida 1967/1982: 22; Adventures: 124); there is no kingdom of the queer.21 21

“Queer, in its deconstructive sense, designates a kind of Derridean différance, occupying an interstitial space between binary oppositions. . . . This use of queer finds its energy from the way the term works to undo the binary between straight and gay, operating uncannily between but also elsewhere. Queer—precisely by marking out the space and time of différance—can thus show how the two, gay and straight, are inter-implicated and how they differ from themselves from within. . . . Meanwhile, queer can also be a grammatical perversion, a misplaced pronoun, the wrong proper name; it is what is strange, odd, funny, not quite right, improper. Queer is what is and is not there, what disaggregates the coherence of the norm from the very beginning” (Freccero 2006: 18– 19). See also my Editor’s Afterword to Adventures in Theory, called “(Still) No Kingdom (of the Queer).”

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Heteronormativity, however, is a big “fucking” kingdom, a vast kingdom in which all real “fucking” is retroactively ruled over by its idealized product or result: “King Baby,” the ideological figure of “the Child” through which heteronormativity perpetuates its reign by attempting to ensure that “the future” is always “kid stuff.” Now, the first chapter of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive is called “The Future is Kid Stuff.” There, speaking for queers, queerness, and queer sexuality—and speaking quite provocatively in favor of associating all three with the death drive—Edelman writes: On every side, our enjoyment of liberty is eclipsed by the lengthening shadow of a Child whose freedom to develop undisturbed by encounters . . . with an “otherness” of which its parents, its church, or the state do not approve, uncompromised by any possible access to what is painted as alien desire, terroristically holds us all in check and determines that political discourse conform to the logic of a narrative wherein history unfolds as the future envisioned for a Child who must never grow up . . . That Child, immured in an innocence seen as continuously under siege, condenses a fantasy of vulnerability to the queerness of queer sexualities . . . The Child, that is, marks the fetishistic fixation of heteronormativity: an erotically charged investment in the rigid sameness of identity that is central to the compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism. And so, as the radical right maintains, the battle against queers is a life-and-death struggle for the future of a Child whose ruin is pursued by feminists [and] queers. (2004: 21–2)

But Edelman goes on to argue that it isn’t just the “radical right” that enforces this “compulsory narrative of reproductive futurism”; it isn’t just the “moral majority” that insists on sacrificing everybody’s libidinal and aesthetic liberty to the future good of the permanent Child (an idealized figure of “imaginary unity” that, as Edelman points out, has little enough or “fuck all” to do with actual children); the radical left and even some in the gay/lesbian community also get in on the act, bowing heads to singer “Whitney Houston’s rendition of the secular hymn, ‘I believe that children are our future,’ a hymn we might as well simply declare our national anthem and be done with it” (2004: 143). For Edelman, moreover, the identity politicians of the gay/lesbian community are never more indentured to the “pro-procreative ideology” (2004: 12) of reproductive futurism than when they deny the religious right’s hysterical slanders against those who engage in non-procreative or queer sex, when they dispute the idea that queers really do embody “a drive toward death that entails the destruction of the Child” (2004: 21).

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Now, Edelman isn’t saying that queers qua queers literally desire to sexually murder real children, as per extremist right-wing fantasy. Nor is he saying that queer politics shouldn’t fight against homophobic conservative slander and dogma. But what he is saying is perhaps no less startling and abrasive. Without ceasing to refute the lies that pervade . . . right-wing diatribes, do we also have the courage to acknowledge, and even to embrace, their correlative truths? Are we willing to be sufficiently oppositional to the structural logic of opposition—oppositional, that is, to the logic by which politics reproduces our social reality—to accept that figural burden of queerness . . . of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void [that is] always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core? Not that we are, or ever could be, outside the Symbolic ourselves: but we can, nonetheless, make the choice to accede to our cultural production as figures—within the dominant logic of narrative, within Symbolic reality—for the dismantling of such a logic and thus for the death drive it harbors within. (2004: 22; Adventures 278–9)22

What’s at stake in Edelman’s provocative argument is the oppositional relation between “the queerness of queer sexuality” and the “meaning” of sociality itself. He argues that our current symbolic reality is a “collective fantasy that invests the social order with meaning by way of reproductive futurism” and “bestows the imprimatur of meaning-production [only] on heterogenital relations” (2004: 28. 13). Reproductive futurism depends upon a “meaningful” libidinal investment in the ideological figure of “the Child” and on vigilantly protecting that figure from all queer figurations. It isn’t just “the Child” but “meaning” itself that must be protected from the queer, who embodies the destruction of heteronormative “meaning.” But “the queer” isn’t simply “the homosexual,” the gay man or lesbian woman, but rather anyone whose gender or sexuality “can’t be made to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993: 8), anyone for whom “the distinctly sexual nature of human sexuality has to do precisely with its excess over or potential difference from the bare choreographies of procreation” (Sedgwick 1990: 29). Reproductive futurism is a “pro-procreative ideology” that attempts to reduce not only “the meaning”

22

The wording of this passage from No Future differs slightly from the version that appears in Adventures in Theory.

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of human sexuality but the meaning of “meaning” itself to those bare choreographies.23 This ideology maintains, as the narrator of P.D. James’s The Children of Men puts it, that “sex totally divorced from procreation” is “meaninglessly acrobatic” (in Edelman 2004: 13); this ideology tells us that to engage in such “sterile” shenanigans is to behave like an animal. Reproductive futurism tells us: “If there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.” If, however, there is no baby and, in consequence, no future, then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning and therefore as responsible for the undoing of social organization, collective reality, and inevitably, life itself. (Edelman 2004: 12–13)

Edelman argues that queerness demands something other than simply denying responsibility for the destruction of “meaning,” something other than the attempt to earn “a place at the table” of heteronormative “social organization” and become full-fledged members of a “collective reality” determined and driven by reproductive futurism. There might be a placesetting waiting for any good homosexual who buys into heteronormative “meaning-production,” but the “structural mandate” of reproductive futurism is always that s/he “who refuses the Child be refused . . . be projectively reviled” (2004: 45), punitively abjected. Edelman thus wants queers to resist the regimes of the normal by accepting “the figural burden of queerness,” by accepting responsibility for the destruction of “meaning” and the abject “undoing of social organization,” by happily embodying that symbolic reality’s inner void and its death drive to the hilt. If “the sacralization of the Child . . . necessitates the sacrifice of the queer (2004: 28), then for Edelman a real insistence on queerness by queers—as per the old in-your-face AIDS23

“Homophobia cannot be separated from racism”: To pull a few discursive threads together here, let’s recall that moment way back in the Preface when I first adumbrated Edelman’s assertion that “queerness can never define an identity [but] can only ever disturb one” (2004:17) and paired that truth-claim with Jared Sexton’s description of “racial blackness” as “that which disturbs every claim or formation of identity and difference as such” (2016: np). Then let’s connect Edelman’s analysis of “the meaning of ‘meaning’ itself ” as constitutively anti-queer to these comments by Calvin Warren (quoted at greater length in a footnote in Lesson Eight): “Meaning itself is an aspect of anti-blackness. [. . .] The very structure of meaning in the modern world [. . .] depends on anti-black violence for its constitution” (226). And if we can condense these connections into a single assertion—that “identity” and “meaning” take their stand at the crossroads of anti-queerness and anti-blackness—then we should be able to grasp what Ibram X. Kendi means when he writes that “Homophobia cannot be separated from racism. They’ve intersected for ages” (2019: 193).

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activist slogan “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”—necessitates nothing short of a massive cluster “fuck you” to the Child, which obscene discursive gesture Edelman is more than happy to provide. After reviewing some standard anti-gay-rights sentiments issued by religious representatives of church and state sanctioned sociality, Edelman writes that Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order’s prerogatives [i.e., the benefits of matrimony], not only by avowing our capacity to promote that order’s coherence and integrity [by serving in the military], but also by saying explicitly what [Cardinal Bernard] Law and the Pope [John Paul II] and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck [“the sun will come up tomorrow”] Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws with both capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (2004: 29; Adventures 282)

III: In the end: theory is (not—) forever As you might imagine, not everyone in even the queer academic community applauded No Future’s abrasive, anti-social, f-bombing barrage.24 But to me it seems entirely appropriate to start bringing not only this lesson in gendertroubling queer theory but all ten of our theoretical lessons to an end with Edelman’s incomparable negativity. It seems meet and fitting for us to end our theoretical narrative with Edelman’s queerly affirmative nod toward the death drive, for we’ve learned a few lessons here about the strange relations between narrative writing and our unconscious desire for “the end.” In the beginning, we were subjected to some unsettling lessons in “anthropogenetic” textuality, alienating interpretations of our polymorphously perverse geneses; if we learned those early lessons sufficiently, if we read those lessons and all that followed closely enough, then perhaps here, in the end, we can understand what queer theorist Carla Freccero means when she seriously suggests that “all textuality, when subjected to close reading, can be said to be queer,” why

24

For critiques and defenses, see Hall (2006); Halberstam et al. (2006); Dean (2008); Ruti (2008), and, more recently, Coffman (2022).

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she writes that “if one were being playfully adjectival . . . one might call English departments departments of queer studies”, why she (and for that matter I) both seriously and playfully hold theory and literature, or theory as literature, to be “always already queer” (2006: 5,18, 13). For like “queerness,” theory and literature offer themselves as “site[s] of permanent becoming” (Jagose 1996: 131), discursive activities that “can never define an identity” but “can only ever disturb one” (Edelman 2004: 17). And to return one last time to the titles of our identity-disturbing lessons in theory, we might suggest that that in the end they’re all kind of “queer,” that “queerness” in its most current usage effectively addresses what’s been at stake all along in this strange set of defamiliarizing axioms: that the world must be made to mean; that meaning is only the polite word for pleasure (whether that pleases us or not); that language is by nature fictional, as are we, the animals at its mercy; that our desires are thus never purely instinctual or merely biological but must always be taken literally, to the letter; that we are consequently not quite ourselves today, and weren’t yesterday, and, bet your bottom dollar, still won’t be “tomorrow” (even if the sun does come up); that restless negativity is therefore the actual substance of our subjectivities, what we anti-essentially are; that even our most highly valued documents of civilization will probably always also document our yawping barbarisms, if only because the unconscious, with all its aggressions, “desires, repressions, investments and projections” (Said 1979: 8) is structured like a language; that there’s consequently nothing for us outside the text, which means that we are never born human, much less gendered, but always have to become human (though not necessarily so narrowly gendered nor so monolithically sexuated) in a world that, precisely because it always must be made to mean, could always be made to mean more queerly. Maybe “queerness” in Edelman’s “anti-social” and “anti-futuristic” sense can serve for a while as the last best “critical keyword” for the occluded but constitutive negativity of all human reality after the linguistic turn—the restless force of negativity that pervades the centerless core of “what theory does”—so that what it means in Edelman’s “demeaning” terms “to accept the figural burden of queerness . . . of the force that shatters the fantasy of Imaginary unity, the force that insists on the void [that is] always already lodged within, though barred from, symbolization: the gap or wound of the Real that inhabits the Symbolic’s very core” could be intimately related to what it means in Lacan’s terms “to accept castration” (2008: 41), to accept “the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (1966d/2006: 262), or to what it means in Horkheimer and Adorno’s terms to “negate reification” (1947/2002: xvii), or to what it means in Culler’s terms to always take “meaning as a problem rather than a given” (2007: 85), or even to what it means in Hegelian

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parlance to embrace dissolution, to “tarry with the negative,” to engage with “the tremendous power of the negative” so as to free all of our “determinate thoughts from their fixity” (1807/1998: 59, 60). Throughout these ten lessons, I’ve insisted that theoretical writing— writing about “writing as the very possibility of change” (Cixous 1975/2007: 1646)—involves a thoroughgoing refusal to fix meaning, a perpetual attempt “to dereify the language of thought” (Jameson 2009: 9). At the risk of seeming to reify this very refusal of fixity, of letting this “refusal to fix meaning” become the fixed meaning of theory itself, I will end by stating my own interpretive desire to perpetually connect this “refusal to fix” to whatever “resistance to regimes of the normal” we can muster, to perpetually fix this “refusal to fix” to our ongoing political and aesthetic project of making “the world queerer than ever” (Warner 1993: xxvi, xxvii). The world, let’s say, is always already queerer than ever, but only because it still always has to be made that way, still has to be written that way—by us. For to rewrite the words from Jean-Luc Nancy that appeared at the end of our lesson on Hegel, this queerer-than-ever “world is precisely what . . . manifests itself as a restlessness”: this globally restless and eternally queer negativity is “not only ours” but “is itself ‘us’ ” (Nancy 2002: 78), all of us, every single one of us, living or dead— strangely enough. For Hegel, let’s recall, though no longer living, still writes that “something moves, not because at one moment it is here and at another there, but because at one and the same moment it is here and not here, because in this ‘here’, it at once is and is not” (1812/1998: 239). And Lacan, let’s remember, though likewise no longer alive, still writes of the written letter not “that, like other objects, it must be or not be somewhere but rather that, unlike them, it will be and not be where it is wherever it goes” (Lacan 1966a/2006:17).25 And so maybe the queerest thing about us animals at the mercy of moving letters will always be that “we’re here” and we’re not wherever we end up going. And perhaps “the activities that have come to answer to the nickname theory” (Culler 2007: 1) can serve, if only for the passing moment, as our queerest, our strangest, our strongest way of “coming to terms” with this (no) future, this eternally returning affirmation, in the present that we’re making, not simply of “no future” but of all the future(s) of the word “no.” Which is what I think I mean when I write that in the end “theory is (not—) forever,” an inscription I’m sure I mean to be taken three ways: theory 25

Hegel, Lacan, and basically all the dead writers who ever lived can be said to “still write,” to still be writing, by virtue of the literary convention that bids us describe “what has been written” in the present tense, as if we’d just seen a ghost: this apparitional aspect of all textuality is more or less what I was getting at way back in the Introduction when I referred to “the undead,” to “everyone who still participates in human reality, if only in the spectral form of writing.”

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is forever; theory is not forever; and theory is this perpetual not—is this restlessness of the negative, is this refusal of the authority of every is that there is—forever (or at least for as long as “human reality” is still a going concern). What I think I mean by writing “theory is (not—) forever” is that all theoretical writing is “always already queer” to the extent that “theory never stops coming back” (Rabaté 2002: 10) as the personal and collective site of our permanent(ly) becoming (undone), so that, at least in theory, “we never stop losing ‘the fixity of [our] self-positing’ ” (Nancy 2002: 79). Like any productive unfixity, like any “possibility of change,” like anything that restlessly moves—like “all textuality,” like all desire, like all writing, like “all of us”—theory is here, and it’s queer, and, at the same time, it’s not. So here I’m tempted simply to trot out the old activist taunt “get used to it!” once again and consider my work done. But if theory is actually (not—) forever, then this work, our arduous “attempt to dereify the language of thought,” our protracted “labor of ambiguating categories of identity,” can never be quite so tidily finished. For any “terms” with which we could ever fully “come to terms” would not be effectively theoretical terms, and any writing that we could ever get comfortably “used to” would not be specifically theoretical writing, would not be “theory as liberatory practice” (bell hooks), would not be the radical “practice of creativity” (Foucault 1983/1997: 262) to which it’s been my great pleasure to introduce you here. For to revisit some rude and radical statements about theory that appeared at the beginning of this introduction, isn’t the “whole point” of theory not to get used to anything but rather, in Judith Halberstam’s words, “to fuck shit up” (2006: 824)? Isn’t the aim of theory to produce or provoke “insights which completely shatter and undermine our common perceptions” (Žižek 2006: ix)—those perceptions of the present to which we’ve gotten all too commonly accustomed? And isn’t “the task of theory . . . to make the present and thus to . . . invent the subject of that making, a ‘we’ characterized not only by our belonging to the present but by our making it” (Hardt 2011: 21)? If our actively and provocatively “making the present” is indeed the perpetual “task of theory,” as Michael Hardt proposes in “The Militancy of Theory,” then our having gotten used to any present that presently is could only mean our having gotten off task, our having settled for taking the meanings of the present, the past, and the future, as reified givens rather than as ever-startling problems and possibilities. So perhaps we’d best get used to not getting used to the activities nicknamed “theory.” And perhaps getting used to never getting used to the arduous task of theoretical writing means nothing more or less than taking the full measure of Foucault’s militantly queer wisdom and joining him in (still) thinking (about thinking) that “there are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive

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differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all” (1986: 7).

IV: The ending isn’t over: or, that’s/we’re “the not-all,” folks So that’s the way the first edition of Ten Lessons in Theory ended, with yours truly giving the final words to Foucault, the very last of those final words the all-inclusive word “all.” Some of my parting phrases in the preceding section, as you’ll have seen, also include “all.” Those formulations—extravagantly positing all desire, all theory, all writing, and all of us, as queer—were all composed around 2012, but they now all seem to me to gesture towards what the Shakespeare scholar Madhavi Menon would in 2015 call “queer universality.” At the end of her book called Indifference to Difference: Towards a Queer Universalism, Menon rather radiantly writes that what’s queer about queer theory is its ability to recognize and sympathize with longings across borders, to refuse the logic of particularity in relation to desire; to keep the door universally open rather than shutting it behind our backs; to think of desire as that which moves across rather than being confined to sexual acts and identities. A theory that would undermine this ontology by dwelling incessantly on the idea of noncohering particulars would be both queer and universal—queer because universal. . . . [I]f we consider that queerness—at a minimum— refuses the predeterminable cohesion of identity, then we are immediately in the domain of the universal. . . . Universalism as the political thing that makes particulars fail to cohere; universalism as the idea that spurs longing across borders; universalism as the notion that allows intellectual ferment: these are the domains of the queer. The universalism of noncohering particulars is queer, then, because it shows up the futility of using partition as a bulwark against the migration of peoples, ideas, and desires. A queer universalism does not belong anywhere, and it is owned by no one (2015: 127).

I would end by offering that queer universalism belongs nowhere and is “owned by no one” precisely because it is extimately shared by “all of us,” whether we all know it, whether we all like it, whether we all have the courage to face the cacophonous music of that perpetual identity-disturbance, or not. Queer universalism is owned by no “one” because, as per the main message of Lesson Five, no one is ever utterly oneself, because no particular one of all of us can ever be self-identically “one.”

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And, to (not) end on a noncohering note of ontological lack and linguistically determined incompletion, I’ll simply assert that queer universalism is extimately shared by “all of us” because, to let Menon say it, and to maybe finally “fail better” than ever by this time giving a queer woman of color the very last words of these Ten Lessons— The lived reality of our lives is that we are not ontologically grounded. Such a lack of grounding repeatedly, universally, undermines the attempt to forge an ontology out of a particular. Keeping open the question of whether or not the self can ever coincide with itself, universalism is the language for all because it is the language of the not-all. (2015: 126–7)

Coming to Terms Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Ten: performativity, performative/constative utterances, compulsory heterosexuality, identity politics, strategic essentialism, écriture feminine, cyborg, heteronormativity, erotic stratifications, queer, queer theory, reproductive futurism

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Index Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ indicate a footnote, the number following ‘n’ indicates the footnote number when there is more than one footnote on the page. The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (Hannah-Jones) xv, xixn, xliv, xlvn. 27, 114n, 120n, 125n, 128n. 23, 157n, 160n, 208n Abbott, Greg xxxixn. 24 Abel, Elizabeth 45n. 3, 201n. 6, 202n abjection xxix, xxxi–xxxii, xxxiin. 16, xxxiii–xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii, 87, 195, 201n. 5 Absolute Knowing 143 abstract self-identity (dead being) 140–141, 155 Achebe, Chinua 161n acid attacks 267n. 2 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 263, 263n, 268, 269n. 6, 269n. 7, 273, 285 Adorno, Theodor xxxviin, 2n. 2, 6, 22, 23, 25n, 98, 100, 100n. 4, 101n, 117, 293 aesthetic modernism 249 aesthetic postmodernism 249 aestheticism 96 affirmations, theoretical 18 Afghanistan, closure of schools for girls in 267n. 2 Africa, Achebe on 161n African Americans 120n Afropessimism xvi, xxvi, xxviin, xxxii, xxviiin. 10, 151 Agamben, Giorgio 128n Agrarians xxxviiin, 169, 169n. 5 Ahmad, Aijaz 245, 253, 258, 258n, 259, 260 Alexander, Leslie 125n Alexander, Michelle 125n

alienated labor 163, 295 Almond, Ian 257 Althusser, Louis xxivn. 6, xxxn. 14, xxxin, 34, 36n. 11, 112–113, 115, 116–117, 119, 120, 121, 122n. 19, 123, 125, 126, 127, 129, 136, 204n, 221, 230, 230n Anglo-American Formalism (New Criticism) 166–167, 169n. 5, 171 animal instinct 70 animalization xxix animated cartoons, anthropomorphized animals 42 Anthropocene 242n, 243n anthropogenesis xxiii, 52, 77 anti-humanist theorists 12n anti-theological 277 anti-trans politics 269 antiblackness xxviin, xxxii, xxxix, 207n, 210n, 262n. 36 antiphysis xxii–xxiii, xxiiin.5, xxvi, xxxvii, xxxviii–xxxix, xl, 31–32, 80, 96, 118, 128, 191, 202 antitheory 2n. 1 antithesis 143–150 Aristotle xxxviii, xxxviiin, 179, 196 Armstrong, Neil 9 Arnold, Matthew 169n. 6, 173n art 127, 177–178 postmodern 251 purpose of xx–xxin2, 176 Arya, Rina xxin. 2, xxv, xxxiv, xxxvi, 24, 37 Asiedu, Kwasi Gyamf 85n. 18 Aufhebung (sublation) 137–140, 144, 202

319

320

Index

aura 102, 102n Austin, J.L. 271 authenticity 98n authors disappearance or death of 229 function of 229–230 Bahri, Deepika 253, 254, 256, 256n, 257, 273, 274, 281, 284 Baker, Houston 169n. 5 bare life 128n Barnes, Natasha 280n, 285 Barthes, Roland xxiiin. 5, xxvin, xlii, 13n. 12, 18, 55, 60n. 6, 119n, 182–183, 193, 204n, 225, 227, 228–229, 229n, 233, 251, 252, 265, 277, 279 on language 54, 54n on literature 90 on myths xxiiin. 5, 117, 118, 186 on writing as an anti-theological activity 277 base 172n see also superstructure Bataille, Georges 68n. 3, 69n, 70, 234 bathrooms gendered/ungendered 45n. 3, 201n. 6 for Ladies, Gentlemen and Colored 209n Baudrillard, Jean 242, 242n Beardsley, Monroe 172 The Beast in the Nursery (Phillips) 43 Beauvoir, Simone de xxii, xxiiin. 5, xxxvi, 3, 37n. 12, 265–266, 268, 280 Beckett, Samuel xiv, xv, xvi, xviii, xx, xxii, 59, 231, 260 Becoming Human (Jackson) xxxn. 14 being house of being 78 and meaning 62 and nothing 145 Beloved (Morrison) xliv, 35n, 161–162 Benjamin, Andrew 222n, 227

Benjamin, Walter 99n. 3, 102, 102n, 163, 165, 166, 168, 172, 172n, 240, 267n. 3 Bentham, Jeremy 129n Berlant, Lauren 285n, 288 Berman, Marshall 237–238 Bersani, Leo 273, 274 Bertens, Hans 168, 173n Bérubé, Michael 11, 11n. 8 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 92n. 26 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) 74, 76n. 8, 83n Bhabha, Homi 9, 9n. 6, 214, 257–258, 258n BHLCT see The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (Di Leo, editor) The Big Sleep (film) 255–256 binary oppositions 217, 217n. 4 biopolitics 230n, 233n biopower 230n, 262n. 37 Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies see Birmingham School Birmingham School 29, 246, 247n see also Frankfurt School Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 68n. 3, 70n. 4, 218 Black Americans, during racial terror 208n. 10 black identity, definitions of xxviin Black nihilism 207n Black people 120n Bloom, Harold 18 Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (Goodman, editor) 10n The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (Di Leo, editor) 2n, 4n, 14n, 166n, 230n Blow, Charles M. xixn The Body Artist (DeLillo) 62 Bogart, Humphrey 257

Index Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles 244 books, banning of xliv Borromean knot 34n. 7 Bosch, Hieronymus 110 Boswell, Maia 201n. 6, 202n Bouie, Jamelle xixn Boylan, Jennifer Flynn xxxix, 269n. 7 Brand, Dionne 233n Breu, Christopher xxxviin Brinkmeyer, Robert 169n. 5 Brolaski, Julian Talamentez 37n. 12 Brooks, Cleanth 168, 171, 173n, 181, 194, 268, 268n. 5, 269 Brooks, Peter 81n Buck-Morss, Susan 149n, 152n. 13 Butler, Judith xv, xixn, xxxiv, 44n, 65, 71n. 4, 98, 99n. 2, 135, 136n. 2, 201n. 6, 212, 212n, 270, 271–272, 274 Byrd, Jodi xxxvin Callimachi, Rukmini 41n camera 250 Cameron, James 241 Candide (Voltaire) 160 capitalism 114n Carr, David 23n Casablanca (film) 151n castration, symbolic 67, 67n, 82, 208n. 10 castration anxiety 203 castration complex 67n cathexis 197 Cavanagh, Sheila L. 201n. 5, 202n, 209, 209n Césaire, Aime 156n, 248n Chare, Ralph 100n. 3 Childers, Joseph xxxii, xxxixn. 23, 11n. 9, 12n, 21, 23n, 29n, 60n. 5, 93n, 103n, 122n. 19, 123n. 20, 143n, 149n, 170, 170n, 172n, 198n, 271, 271n, 274n Chilvers, Ian 178n Chow, Rey 20, 223 Christianity 149, 150, 150n

321

cinema 102n Civilization and its Discontents (Freud) 33, 211 Cixous, Hélène xvii, xviii, xxi, xxxvii, 21, 96, 277–278, 279, 280, 294 Clark, T.J. 250n Close, Chuck 251 Clynes, Manfred 278n Coates, Ta-Nehesi xxvi Coffman, Chris 37n. 13, 292n the cogito 103, 103n, 104, 105, 130 Cohen, Tom 243n Cole, Andrew 135, 136n. 2, 153n colonial discourse 214 colonialism 252 commodity fetishism 123, 123n. 20 common perceptions 6 common sense 116, 130 compulsory heterosexuality 271, 271n concepts 216 condensation 192, 195 see also displacement Conrad, Joseph xxx, 159, 159n, 160–161, 161n, 163 constantive utterances 271 constitutive otherness 187 contiguity 189 contradiction 139, 150n, 220 Copjec, Joan 272 Cournot, Michel 210n creativity, practice of 18 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 10n Critchley, Simon 25n, 132 critical race theory xix–xxn. 1 Critical Terms for Literary Study (McLaughlin) 15 Critique of Black Reason (Mbembe) 261 Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre) 235n Culler, Jonathan 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10–11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 24, 182, 183, 187, 270, 293, 294 cultivation 99n. 3 cultural 99, 99n. 3

322

Index

cultural forms 182 cultural phenomena 182 cultural studies 251 culture 99n. 3 Cunningham, Vinson xxviin cyborgs 278–279, 278n De Lauretis, Teresa 265 de-sedimentation 23, 24n. 18 see also sedimentation Dean, Tim 212n, 272, 288, 292n death/death drive 74–81, 83, 92, 292 decolonization xxxvn. 18 deconstruction 24, 24n. 18, 217, 217n. 4, 222n, 225, 260 defamiliarization 11, 11n. 9, 100n. 4, 131, 173, 178 artistic 177–178 dehumanization xxix, 44n DeLillo, Don 62 demand 69–70, 73 animal demand and botanical need 71 and the imaginary 71 democracy 261 demystification 100n. 4 Derrida, Jacques 8, 12n, 15, 19, 20, 21, 24n. 18, 25, 72, 78n. 11, 90, 94, 105, 143n, 198n, 214, 214n, 216, 216n, 217n. 4, 218n, 220, 221–222, 222n, 223, 224–226, 224n. 8, 224n. 9, 227, 229, 233, 234, 257, 260, 260n, 261, 274, 288 DeSantis, Rick 246n Descartes, René 103, 103n, 130 desire 66–96, 197 desire of 79 interpretation of 89–96 symbolic 71, 72, 77 Desmond, Matthew 114n Di Leo, Jeffrey R. xv, 2n. 1, 4n. 3 dialectic 108, 108n, 110, 140n. 5, 148 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno) 2n. 2, 22

dialectical thought 245n différance 216, 216n, 218n digital technology, shift from industrial mechanics to 242 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 129n discourse 19, 19n, 21, 231 disinterestedness 169, 169n. 6 displacement 192 of enjoyment 195 see also condensation Django Unchained (film) 151n documents of civilization 99, 99n. 3, 160–179, 267n. 3 dreams 53, 193, 194–195 Drexler, Michael xxviii drugs 219 Du Bois, W.E.B. 207n Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne xlvn. 27 Dunn, Allen R. 12n Eagleton, Terry xix, xx, 165–168, 169n. 5, 171, 172n, 173n, 198n écriture feminine 277–278 ecstasy 70n Edelman, Lee xxxiii, 35, 288, 289–292, 291n, 293 Ehsan, Ehsanullah 267n. 2 Eichenbaum, Boris 166 Emancipation After Hegel (McGowan) 137, 150n emancipatory effects 247 Emre, Merve 285, 285n Eng, David 256, 257n English studies 173n the Enlightenment 149, 149n, 156n, 234, 239–240, 239n. 19 epistemology 103, 103n Eros 74, 83, 84 see also Thanatos erotic stratifications 286, 286n eschatology 143, 143n essentialisms xxxix, xxxixn. 23, 9, 9n. 7, 269, 270n Essentially Speaking (Fuss) 9n. 7 Eugenides, Jefferey 226

Index Evans, Dylan xxv, 194n Exterminate All the Brutes!” (Peck) xlvn. 27 extermination xxix extimacy xxv, xxvn. 8, xxvi Eyers, Tom 33n, 68n. 2, 166n familiarization 131 see also defamiliarization Fanon, Frantz xv, xxin. 2, xxvn. 7, xxviii, xxxv, xxxvn. 19, 88n, 106n, 125n, 154, 207n, 210n, 233n, 263 Farias, Victor 78n. 11 Faulkner, William 88 Fausto-Sterling, Anne xixn female genital cutting (FGC) 248, 248n, 266n feminism/feminists 262–263, 268, 272–273, 280n Anglo-Eurocentric 280 ethnocentrism of 285 Eurocentric 280 limitations of 286 postmodern 241n. 22 Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism 269 feminist movement 280n. 14 feminist theorists/theory 269, 275 fetishism 123, 123n. 20, 167–168, 170 fiction 55, 233, 233n Findlay, John 109n, 136n. 2 Fiske, John 247n Floyd, George 125n form 177, 181 formalists/formalism 166, 170, 172, 181 approach to literature 171 in BHLCT 166n definition of 167 literary 160–179 Russian Formalism 60n. 5, 166, 173 fort-da games 75–78, 266 Foster, Hal xxxiv, xxxv

323

Foucault, Michel xv, xxi, xxin. 3, xxxvii, 5, 6, 18, 93, 96, 98n, 101n, 126–129, 129n, 131, 132, 136n. 2, 157, 213, 214, 220, 225, 227, 230, 230n, 231–233, 232n, 234, 236, 253, 257, 260, 263, 295, 296 on authors 229, 231–232 on biopower 262n. 37 on Hegel 135 ideology of the author function 230 on “Man” 12 on modernity 235 on sex/sexuality 254 Frankfurt School 246, 247n see also Birmingham School Freccero, Carla 287n, 288n, 292–293 Freud, Sigmund xx, xli, 6n, 33, 36n. 12, 40n. 1, 44n, 45n. 4, 49, 52, 59, 61n. 8, 69n, 71, 71n. 5, 74–76, 77n, 78n. 10, 82n. 14, 82n. 15, 83, 83n, 85n. 19, 87n. 21, 104, 108, 109, 110n, 180, 180n, 192, 194n, 198, 203, 204, 205, 205n, 211, 221, 222, 241n. 21, 253 on dreams 53, 194, 195 oceanic feeling 33, 68n. 3 and the Oedipus complex 61, 61n. 7, 203 pleasure principle 43, 51 Friedan, Betty 10n Frow, John 247n Fuss, Diana xxxixn. 23, 9n. 7, 269, 270n The Future of Theory (Rabaté) 4, 135 Gagnier, Regina xxivn. 6 Gallop, Jane 104 Garber, Marjorie 15 Gates, Henry Louis 98n Gauguin, Paul 178, 250 The Gay Science (Nietzsche) 91n, 95n, 127, 130–131

324

Index

gender 13, 44n, 71n. 4, 106n, 270, 272 identity 270 neutrality 44n as performative 271 signs of 275 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche) 95n, 218 genocide 41n George, Sheldon xxvn. 8, xxviin, 262n. 36 The German Ideology (Marx) 30 Getachew, Adom xxxvn. 18 Ghorayshi, Azeen 85n. 18 Gibson, Andrew 18 Gifford, Don 106n Gikandi, Simon 251n Gilbert, Jeremy 29n Giotto (di Bondone, Giotto) 178, 249 Giroux, Henry A. xxviin, xxix, xxx, 114n global capitalist world 114 globalization 248, 248n. 26 God 146–147, 276, 276n and grammar 276 as the thesis 148 Goldbaum, Christian 267n. 2 Goldberg, Jonathan xxxvin, 280n Goldberg, Michelle xixn Goodman, J. David 39n. 24 Gordon, Lewis R. xlvn. 27, 208n. 9, 233n Graff, Gerald xxxvin, xxxviiin Gramsci, Antonio 122n. 19 Gray, Francine du Plessix 266, 268, 268n. 4, 275 Greenbert, Clement 250n Greenblatt, Stephen 99n. 3, 112, 124, 131 Guenif-Soulimas, Nacira 262n. 36 Gutterman, Annabel 263n, 269n. 7 Habermas, Jürgen 234, 247, 249, 257 Hägglund, Martin xv, xxivn.7, xxv, xxxvii, 12n, 31, 31n, 95, 114n, 124, 136n. 1, 147n, 157, 164n, 275, 276

Haitian Revolution 153n Halberstam, Judith 24, 126, 292n, 295 Hall, Stuart xxii, 17, 29, 29n, 292n Halperin, David 273, 288 Han, Shinhee 256, 257n Handbook to Literature (Harmon & Holman) 167 Hannah-Jones, Nikole xv, xixn, xliv, 128n, 208n. 10 Haraway, Donna 212, 241n. 22, 255, 274, 278–279, 278n, 284 Hardt, Michael 5–6, 7, 118, 118n, 295 Harmon, William 166, 167, 169n. 5 Hassan, Ihab 212n Hauser, Christine 41n Hawks, Howard 255 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 159n, 160–161 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich xx, xxvi, xlv, 11n. 10, 23n, 108n, 109n, 135–143, 153n, 169, 235, 236n, 239, 265, 294, 294n on Enlightenment rationality 239 misperception of 136n. 2 philosophy of contradiction 150n hegemony 122, 122n. 19 Heidegger, Martin 23n, 78, 78n. 11, 143n Hekman, Susan xxivn. 6, 276n Hentzi, Gary xxxii, 11n. 9, 12n, 21, 23n, xxxixn. 23, 29n, 60n. 5, 93n, 103n, 122n. 19, 123n. 20, 143n, 149n, 170, 170n, 172n, 198n, 271, 271n, 274n hermeneutics 93, 93n hetero-tautology 143n heteronormativity 285, 285n, 289–290 heteropatriarchy 283n phallogocentric 222 heterosexuality 271n Hill, Mike 100n. 3 historical materialism/materialists xxii, 30, 31

Index The History of Sexuality (Foucault) 128 Holman, Hugh 166, 167, 169n. 5 homophobia, and racism 291n homosexuality, in Uganda 85n. 18 honor killings, of young women 248 Hook, Derek xxvn. 8, xxviin, xxxiin. 6, xxxiii–xxxiv, 262n. 36 hooks, bell 270n, 274n, 277, 279–280 “hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!” 106, 106n. 7 Hopkins, Valerie 85n. 18 horizontal axis of language 189 Horkheimer, Max xxxviin, 2n. 2, 6, 22, 23, 117, 293 How to Read Lacan (Žižek) 52n, 180n Hughes, Langston 169n. 5 human desire 70, 79 human history 32n. 4 human reality 19–20, 29–37, 153, 163, 241 humanism 12, 12n humanization xxxin 14, 36n. 11 human(s) distinguishing animals from xxiv–xxvn. 7, 30, 35 meaning 18 premature birthing 35, 39 sexual desire 83 sexuality 253 suffering 98 humans, work of suffering human beings 173n Hurtado, Aida 10n Husserl, Edmund 23n, 143n Huston, John 255 hybridity 257–258, 258n “I,” difference between an “it” and 110n iconic signs 184 identity 95, 125 categories of 99n. 2 identity politics 99, 99n. 3, 273, 274n

325

Ideological State Apparatus 122, 122–123n. 19 see also Repressive State Apparatus ideology as eternal 111–125 function of 113 imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence 115 Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (film) 151n the Imaginary 33, 34n. 7, 71, 73 see also the Real; the Symbolic imaginary demand 71, 72, 77, 77n immediacy 138, 139 see also mediation immortality 146 imperialism 252 the impolite 44, 44n incest 84, 85, 87, 88 indetermanence 212, 212n indexical signs 184, 188 India British intervention in the Sati 284 police brutality towards women in 283 individuation 68n. 3 infantile psyche 44 infantile sexuality, as polymorphously perverse 82n. 4 Infinite Jest (Wallace) 241 inhuman 44n injustice 219 interpellation 119, 120 interpretation death of 94 of desire 89–96 life of 94 modes of 223n performative 21 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud) 180n intersectionality 9, 10n Inwood, Michael 138, 146, 149 Irigaray, Luce 280

326

Index

Jackson, Andrew xlvn. 26 Jackson, Tiara xxviin Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman xxiii, xxiiin. 4, xxviin, xxxn. 14, xxxii, 24n. 19, 221, 233n Jaffe, Aaron 247n Jagose, Annamarie 288, 293 Jakobson, Roman 178, 191–192, 193, 194 James, Henry 60 James, P.D. 291 Jameson, Fredric xx, xxix, xxxi, xxxvii, 3, 3n, 4, 13n. 11, 15, 20, 20n. 15, 29, 32n. 4, 54, 59, 100, 100n. 4, 109n, 122, 122n. 18, 136, 136n. 2, 137, 137n, 144n, 147n, 156, 157, 180, 215, 243–246, 247, 248, 251, 258, 294 on dialectical thought 245n on the link between Vico and Marx 30n on truth 98 on the un-naturality of theoretical writing 11 Jaschik, Scott xixn Jeong, May 257n Jesus Christ 148 Johnson, Barbara 56, 212, 224 Johnston, Adrian xxv, xxxv, 36n. 12, 136n. 2, 140n. 5, 141n, 144n, 145 Jones, Ernest 74n jouissance 84, 84n Joyce, James 60n. 4, 106n Kant, Immanuel 100n. 4, 149n, 163, 169n. 6, 236n, 239n. 19, 259 Kasdan, Lawrence 243 Kavanagh, James 112, 116, 119, 125 Keegan, Cáel M. xxxixn. 24, 44n Kendi, Ibram X. xxxivn, xlvn. 27, 156, 157n, 291n Kermode, Sir Frank xxxviiin Khan, Azeen xxvn. 8, 262n. 36 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah 231

King, Martin Luther 136n. 1, 152n. 13, 157–158 Kline, Nathan S. 278n Kojève, Alexandre 66, 78, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156 Kristeva, Julia xxxi, xxxii, 87, 95, 101, 201n. 5, 233n, 280 Kruger, Barbara 100–101, 102 Kuiken, Kir 128n labor xxxix, 34 alienated labour xxxn. 13, 163 forms of 172n Lacan, Jacques xvii, xx, xxiv, xxxin, xxiiin. 5, 13, 18, 33n, 34n. 7, 35, 36, 39, 40n. 1, 44n, 46, 47, 49n, 58, 59, 60–61, 62, 85n. 19, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 106n, 108, 109n, 110, 110n, 111–112, 123, 125n, 130, 131, 180, 180n, 188, 189, 192, 193, 194, 194n, 195, 196, 197, 198, 198n, 200, 200n, 201, 201n. 5, 201n. 6, 202, 202n, 203, 205, 206, 207n, 208n. 10, 209, 210, 211, 212, 212n, 221, 222, 260, 265, 272, 293, 294, 294n characterization of the word as “a presence made of absence” 57 on distinguishing human reality from the Real 33, 34 interpretation of human desire 90–91 on language 46 l’être pour la lettre 47–50, 66 in “The Signification of the Phallus” 209 on specific prematurity at birth of humans 35 on the symbolic order 36 on taking desire literally 66–96 understanding of neurotic symptoms 194n Lambert, Greg 230n

Index language 15, 16, 34, 46, 82n. 15, 182 as fictional 54–65, 80 horizontal axis of 189 law of linearity 196 as not transparent 15 and the Oedipus complex 61 vertical axis of 189 The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Laplanche & Pontalis) 71n. 5 Laplanche, Jean 71n. 5, 74n Large, Duncan xxxixn. 23, 276 Lazarus, Neil 257, 259 Le Guin, Ursula K. xviii, xxi, xxxvii, xl Leitch, Vincent B. 2n. 1, 287 lesbians 13 Levi-Strauss, Claude 85n. 19, 221 Lewis, John xiv, xxi liminality 257, 258n Lindqvist, Sven xlvn. 27 linguistic determinism xxiv linguistic signs 184, 185, 186, 221 linguistics 183 literary history 174 The Literary in Theory (Culler) 1 literary interpretation 90 Literary Theory: An Introduction (Eagleton) xix livingness 140 The Location of Culture (Bhabha) 9n. 6 logocentrism 198n logos 198n Long, Robert Aaron 257n Lucas, George 243 Lucy, Niall 214n, 216n, 217n. 4, 223, 224n. 9, 260, 273, 288 Lyotard, Jean-François 234–235, 241, 247, 249 MacDonald, Dwight 251 Macé, Éric 262n. 36 McGowan, Todd 136n. 2, 137n, 140n. 4, 140n. 5, 147n, 150n, 262n. 36, 274n MacKenzie, Gina Masucci 40n. 1

327

McLaughlin, Thomas 15, 16, 18, 21 Maher, Bill 277 Malabou, Catherine xxxvii, 136n. 2 Malone, Kareen xxviin Malpas, Simon xxivn. 6, 84n, 93n, 129n, 191, 216n, 224n. 8, 224n. 9, 229n, 248n, 278n The Maltese Falcon (film) 255 “Man” 8–9, 10, 12, 13 Mannheim, Karl 115 Marriot, David S. 106n, 202n, 262n. 36 Marx, Karl xv, xx, xxii, xxix, xli, 5, 6, 6n, 9, 21, 30n, 31, 33, 34, 48, 82, 100n. 4, 101n, 112, 127, 129, 136n. 1, 156, 163, 164, 164n, 165, 172, 219, 236, 239n. 20, 245–246n. 24, 259, 275, 284 analysis of workers 164–165 commodity fetishism 123n. 20 as an “historical materialist” 30 theory of alienated labour xxxn 13, 163 Marxism 30n, 286 mass culture 246, 247n see also popular culture master-slave story 153–155 materialism/materiality xxxvii, xxxviin, 20, 20n. 15, 20n. 16 The Matrix (film) 110n, 115n Mattison, Laci 14n Mbembe, Achille xxvii, xxviin, xxviiin. 10, 13n. 11, 128n, 242n, 243, 261, 262, 261n. 35, 262n. 36, 262n. 37, 263, 269, 280n meaning 25, 59 as polite word for pleasure 39–53 as a problem or a given 8, 10 proliferation of 213–263 mediation 138, 139 see also immediacy men, performing drag 271–272 Menon, Madhavi 18, 274n, 296, 297 metalanguage 192 metanarrative 234–235 see also narrative/narration

328

Index

metaphor 174–175, 188–198 paternal 206 metaphorical condensation 196 metaphysics xxxix, xxxixn. 23, 223 metonymy 174–175, 188–198 Milani, Farzaneh 106n Miles, Tiya xlvn. 26 Miller, George 241 Miller, Matt 121 Mills, Jon 140n. 5 “The Minimalist Self ” (Foucault) 96 mirror stage 103, 105, 106n, 108, 111, 123 modern philosophy 238–239 modernism aesthetic 237 high 249 modernity 235 philosophical 236, 236n project of 234 modernization 237–238 socio-economic 236 Mohanty, Chandra 280, 280n, 281–282, 281n, 283, 284 Moi, Toril 82n. 15, 268, 269 Molloy (Beckett) xviii Momaday, N. Scott xlii Moms for Liberty xix, xliii moralities master 92n. 26, 223n slave 92n. 26, 223n Morrison, Toni xixn, xliv, 35n, 69n, 71n. 4, 161–162, 202n Moten, Fred xxvi, xlivn, xxxvn. 19, 207n Muhammad, Kahlil Gibran 160n Murphet, Julian 18 Mythologies (Barthes) 13n. 12, 117, 182, 251 myths xxiiin. 5, 22, 83n, 117–118, 186 interpellation 122n. 17 Nachträglichkeit 109 Nancy, Jean-Luc 11n. 10, 15, 135, 136n. 2, 141n, 150, 157, 294, 295

narrative/narration 60 see also metanarrative natural freedom 31n nature 32 Nazis, and Confederate monuments xxviiin. 11 necropolitics 127–128n. 23 Necropolitics (Mbembe) 13n. 11, 242n, 261, 262 need, demand, and desire 49n, 67 see also demand; desire negativity 141 Negri, Antonio 31 negrophobia 210n Nehamas, Richard 95n New Criticism see Anglo-American Formalism (New Criticism) The New Republic (Nussbaum) 272 New York Times 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich xx, xli–xlii, xliii, xlv, xlvi, 6n, 17, 21, 69n, 70n, 71n. 4, 89, 89n, 91–92, 91n, 92n. 25, 93, 94, 95, 95n, 98n, 100n. 4, 101n, 104, 108, 126, 127, 130–131, 213, 214, 214n, 216–217, 218n, 219, 220, 222, 223n, 227, 260, 261, 263, 273, 276–277, 279 critique of philosophical rationalism 218 on the familiar 177 on interpretation 91 overcoming nihilism for 94n principle of individuation 68n. 3 on truth xl, 215, 227n truth about desire 89 nihilism 94 Nikolopoulou, Kalliopi xxxixn. 23, 217n. 3 no to the real 55, 59, 61, 64, 80, 82, 84, 193, 206 Nolen, Stephanie 248n, 266n nothingness 66, 70, 73, 79, 93 Nussbaum, Martha C. 272–273

Index Obama, Barack Hussein xxvi, 158 oceanic feeling 44n, 67n, 68n. 3, 71n. 4, 80, 107, 203 Oedipus complex 61, 61n. 7, 203 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 24n. 18, 224, 226 omniscience 146 “On Truth and Lies” (Nietzsche) 216 onto-theology 143, 143n ontological self-certainty 103 ontology 103n Orange, Tommy xliii, 159n Orban, Viktor xixn, xxxixn. 24 The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (Foucault) 12 Orientalism 253, 254, 255, 257 Orientalism (Said) 284 Osborne, Harold 178n ostranenie (making strange/ defamiliarization) 11n. 9, 173, 175 other, fear of the xxxiii Padsah 267n. 2 painting, history of 249–250 panopticism 129, 129n paradigmatic relations 189, 190 Parents Against Critical Theory xix, xliii, xlivn, xlvi Parker, Robert Dale 2n. 2, 172, 181, 182 parody 243 pastiche 243, 244 paternal metaphor 206 patriarchy 13, 14n, 283 Patterson, Orlando xxviin, 41n Paz, Isabella 41n Pearson, Keith Ansell xxxixn. 23, 276 Peck, Raoul xxx, xlvn. 27, 152n. 12, 153n Peirce, Charles Sanders 184 penisnied (penis envy) 204, 205n performative utterances 271 performativity 270

329

perspective, in painting 178, 178n, 249–250 Petrović, Gajo xxxn. 13 phallocentrism 198n phallogocentric heteropatriarchy 222 phallogocentrism 198n, 212 phallus 198–212 Phelan, James xxxvin, xxxviiin phenomenology 23, 23n, 143, 143n Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 142, 152 Phillips, Adam xxii, 43, 47 philosophy 7–8, 147n, 150 photography 102n, 250–251 physis 118 Picasso, Pablo 102n Plato 83n, 181, 198n, 216, 217n. 4, 242n play 214n affirmation of 223–224 of signification 214 pleasure meaning as polite word for 39–53 negotiation between reality and 47 pleasure principle 43–45, 50, 51, 74 Poe, Edgar Allan 88 Poetics (Aristotle) 196 poetry 174, 178 poetic function 192 poetic imagery 175 poetic language 179 “poetic speech” 178 poetical centers 224n. 8 rhythm of 178 pointing 57–58, 61n. 8 the political xxvi, xxvin. 9 political change 125 political theology 148n, 276n polymorphous perversity 82, 82n. 14 Pontalis, Jean-Baptiste 71n. 5, 74n pop art 251 popular culture 246, 247n see also mass culture

330 Portman, John 244 positive terms 186 post-truth 227n postcolonial theorists/theory 251n, 257 posthumanism xxivn. 7 postmodernism/postmodernity 213, 234–253 philosophical 240 poststructuralism 213, 236, 252 Potebnya, Alexander 173, 174, 176 Pound, Ezra 249 prematurity at birth 69 primal scene 87, 87n. 21 primordial discord 40, 85n. 19 project of modernity 234 prose 179 rhythm of 178 pseudo-physis 118 psychoanalysis 51, 53, 82n. 14, 82n. 15, 103, 205n, 221, 222 The Purpose-Driven Life (Warren) 114n Putin, Vladimir xxxixn. 24, 269n. 7 queer/queer theory 287–288, 287n, 288n, 291–292, 293, 296–297 Rabaté, Jean-Michel 4, 23n, 61n. 7, 131, 135, 143n, 157, 295 Rabinowitz, Peter J. 161n racial blackness xxxiii Racial Melancholia 256 racial segregation, laws of 201n. 6 racism xxn. 1, 156n, 161n, 263 homophobia and 291n Ransom, John Crowe 169n. 5 rape culture 282n. 16 Rasmussen. E. D. 135 Raulet, Gerárd 234, 235 reader-response criticism 229, 229n reading learning to read 49 productive way of 226

Index the Real 33, 34n. 7, 68n. 2, 107 distinguishing human reality from 34 see also the Imaginary; the Symbolic real need 72 real-world people 19n reality 68n. 2 negotiation between pleasure and 47 reality principle 43, 45–46, 50, 51 reason 220 reception theory 229, 229n referent 58, 58n. 2, 185 reification xxix–xxxi, xxxn.13, xxxv, xxxviii, 2, 2–3n. 2, 6, 14 negation of 22, 25 religion 101n, 163, 219, 239n. 20, 275 Repressive State Apparatus 122, 122–123n. 19 see also Ideological State Apparatus reproductive futurism 289–291 rhythm, disordering of 178 Rich, Adrienne 271n Richards, I.A. 168, 173n Richter, David 24n. 18, 170, 173n Richter, Gerhardt 251 Riley, Denise 273 Rimbaud, Artur 37n. 12, 104 Rivkin, Julie 167 Road Warrior (film) 241 Roof, Judith 33, 58n. 3, 67n A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 171, 267–268 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 153n, 224 Rowling, J.K. 269n. 7 Rubin, Gayle xxxn. 14, 82n. 14, 85n. 19, 205n, 270, 286, 286n Rushdie, Salman 231 Russian Formalism 60n. 5, 166, 173 Ruti, Mari xvii, 205n, 211n, 274n, 283, 283n, 292n Ryan, Michael 167

Index Said, Edward xxxv, 30, 122n. 19, 253, 254, 257, 259, 284, 293 Salamon, Gayle 37n. 13 Sartre, Jean-Paul xxiiin. 5, 98n, 127, 129, 235, 235n The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) 231 Saussure, Ferdinand de 24, 55, 180, 181, 182, 186, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 199, 200, 216n, 220, 221, 222 function of synecdoche 191 linguistic signs 184, 185 structural linguistics of 58n. 2 syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations in language 189 Science of Logic (Hegel) 137, 139, 144, 145 Scott, Joan Wallach 262n. 36, 270 The Second Sex (Beauvoir) xxiiin. 5, 37n. 12, 265–266 Sedgwick, Eve 253, 254, 257, 275, 288, 290 sedimentation 23, 23n see also de-sedimentation the self 273–274 sense of self 69n self-consciousness 142, 152 self-identity 141 self-movement 140 self-transformation 96 semiotic materialism xxiv semiotics 19, 19n, 183 sense, making 17 sex/sexuality 13, 81–89, 254 infantile 82n. 14 the unconscious sexual drive 74 as vector of oppression and self-transformation 128 Sexton, Jared xxviin, xxxii, xxxiii, 291n Shakespeare, William 32n. 5, 61n. 7, 171, 237n, 240, 268 Shepherdson, Charles 84n Sheshadri-Crooks, Kalpani xxvn. 8, 201n. 6, 207n

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Sheshadri, Kalpana Rahita xxvn. 7 Shklovsky, Viktor 11n. 9, 100n. 4, 131, 173, 174–178, 179, 190, 191, 192, 196 short circuits 6n Shumway, David 100n. 3 signals 70 The Significance of Theory (Eagleton) 165 signified 58, 58n. 2, 184 signifiers 57, 58n. 2, 140n. 5, 180–212 barrier between the signified and the 207n signs 57, 58n. 2, 70, 183–184, 187 arbitrary nature of 185 of gender 275 similarity 189 simulacrum 242, 242n Sinclair, Upton 11, 11n. 8 slavery xxn.1, xliv, 41n, 149n in America 128n Smith, Jason 25 Smith, Paul Chaat 98n Snyder, Timothy xlvi, 227n social death xxviin, xxxin, xxxviii, 41n, 44n, 233n social relations 125 socially prohibited 86 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner) 88 sovereignty 262 Speck, Oliver C. 151n Specters of Marx (Derrida) 21 speech/writing 217n. 4 Spillers, Hortense J. 44n, 69n Spirit 144n, 147 spiritual freedom 31n Spivak, Gayatri 16, 257, 259, 274, 280, 284 Sprinker, Michael 260n Staples, Brent xxviiin. 11, 151n, 169n. 5 Star Wars (film) 243 Steinem, Gloria 10n Stevens, Lara 198n

332 Stevens, Wallace 25n Stevenson, Bryan 120n Stoltenberg, John 284 Strachey, James 36n. 12 strategic essentialism 274 structuralism 166n, 181, 182, 220, 221 Structuralist Poetics (Culler) 182 structure, concept of 220 subaltern 257, 258n the subject xxiv, xxivn. 6, 119, 121, 142 sublation see Aufhebung Substance 142 suffering 100n. 4 Summers, Lawrence 267n. 3, 282n superstructure 172n see also base supplement 224, 224n. 9 Surin, Kenneth 1–2 the Symbolic 33, 34n. 7, 71 see also the Imaginary; the Real symbolic castration 67, 67n, 82, 208n. 10 symbolic desire 71, 72, 77 symbolic order xxiv, xxiiin. 5, 36–37, 46, 57, 62, 82, 130, 208 symbolic signs 184 symbols 185 symptoms 194, 194n synecdoche 191 syntagmatic relations 189, 190 Tate, Allen 169n. 5 Teaching to Transgress (hooks) 279 teleology 143, 143n The Tempest (Shakespeare) xxxvin, xxxviiin, 32n. 5 The Terminator (film) 241 text, nothing outside 213–263 textual anthropogenesis xxiv Thakur, Gautam Basu 106n Thanatos 74, 83, 84, 240 see also Eros theology 147n

Index theory aim of 295 central task of 8 as dead 1–2 just being difficult/difficulty being just 15–25 purpose of the art of xxin. 2 thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula 137, 144 Theweleit, Klaus 241n. 21 thing-presentations 71, 72 thinking 25n This Life (Hägglund) xv, 31 Thomas, Calvin 269n. 6, 287n Thurman, Judith xxxvi, 37n. 12, 268n. 4 Tibebu, Teshale 156n Tolstoy, Leo 176 Totem and Taboo (Freud) 40n. 1, 61n. 8 trace 224, 224n. 9 trans people 44n trans rights movement 269 transcendental signified 94 transgender studies xxxixn. 24 transphobia 200n. 5 trauma 70n Traumdeutung (Freud) 195 the Trinity 147n Trouillot, Michel-Rolph xlvn. 27, 153n truth xl–xlii, 98, 215, 232 post-truth 227n Uganda, homosexuality legislation in 85n. 18 the unconscious 52, 52n, 53, 180–212 death drive 75 sexual drive 74 understanding 141 ungendered 44n United States anti-Asian violence in 257n health care system 121 universalism 296

Index ur-Rehman, Zia 267n. 2 urinary segregation, laws of 201n. 5 Valences of the Dialectic (Jameson) 3n. 2 Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee 169 Verdichtung (condensation) 195 Verschiebung (displacement) 195 vertical axis of language 189 Vico, Giambattista 30, 30n, 253, 284 violence 273 Voltaire 22, 160, 163 Wake, Paul xxivn. 6, 84n, 93n, 129n, 191, 216n, 224n. 8, 224n. 9, 229n, 248n, 278n Walker, Mark 45n. 26 Wallace, David Foster 60, 241 Walsh, Declan 267n. 2 Warhol, Andy 251 Warner, Michael 285n, 287, 288, 294 Warren, Calvin 207n, 291n Warren, Rick 114n. 12 Warren, Robert Penn 169n. 5 Weheliye, Alexander G. xxvn. 7 Wehr, Donald xxxixn. 23 What Gender Is, What Gender Does (Roof) 58n. 3 White Mythologies (Young) 251–252 White, Susan 256n Whitman, James Q. 169n. 5 Wilder, Billy 243 Wilderson, Frank xxviin The Will to Power (Nietzsche) 89 Wimsatt, W.K. 172

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Wittig, Monique 13 Wolfreys, Julian 19, 19n, 171 “Woman” 9–10, 13 women, Third World 282 Woods, Tim 212n, 258n Woolf, Virginia 106n, 171, 172, 172n, 267, 267n. 3, 282n word-presentations 72 words, meanings of 55–56 work, of suffering human beings 173n workers, Marx’s analysis of 164n world, the see human reality writers, power of 228 writing 217n. 4 Barthes on 228 male writing 277 Wynter, Kevin xixn, xxn. 1, xxviin Wynter, Sylvia xxiiin. 5, 12n, 60, 236n, 280, 280n Yancy, George xiv, xxvii, xxviin, xlv Yeats, William Butler 224n. 8 you as not yourself 97–132 Young, Robert 251n, 252, 252n Yousafzi, Malala 267n. 2 Yovel, Yirmiyahu 137n, 138, 142, 147n Zakaria, Rafia 248n, 266n, 280, 285n Zalloua, Zahi xxvn. 8, 12n, 262n. 36 Žižek, Slavoj xxiv, xxv, xxxin, xxxv, xxxviin, 3, 6, 6n, 7–8, 11n. 8, 24, 50, 52, 52n, 54, 66, 68n. 3, 70, 79, 80, 93, 95, 107, 109n, 135, 136, 136n. 2, 140n. 5, 144n, 180n, 200n, 242n, 259, 272, 281, 282, 284, 295

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